Every New Restaurant in Glencoe Moved Upscale. The Golf Club Didn't Get the Memo.

For years, if you needed lunch before a matinee at Writers Theatre, or a quick bite that didn't require a reservation, you went to Meg's Cafe on Park Avenue. It closed in May 2025 after a long run under owner Barbara Lepman, and the space has since filled twice over with something Glencoe hadn't quite had before: a wait list.

What replaced Meg's, and what's replacing the rest of downtown's casual options one storefront at a time, tells you something about where Glencoe's dining scene is headed. It is not toward more variety. It is toward one direction, up, and the only project pulling against that pattern is a mile away, on a golf course that's been under construction since 2025.

The Corner That Used to Say Yes to Anything

Meg's Cafe and its sister operation, An Apple a Day Catering, ran out of the same Park Avenue storefront for years, serving the kind of menu that worked for a solo lunch, a birthday party platter, or a table of four who hadn't planned ahead. It was the rare Glencoe restaurant built around convenience rather than occasion. When it closed, the village lost its default answer to "where can we just show up and eat."

What Moved Into Its Chair

Glencoe native Daniel Rakestraw bought An Apple a Day Catering from Lepman in August 2025 and opened RDK Sushi in the same 317 Park Avenue space that April. Rakestraw's résumé reads like a tasting menu of its own: dishwashing at Guildhall starting at 15, then stops at Ron of Japan in Northbrook, Sushi-San in Chicago, Kendall College's culinary program, the acclaimed Chicago gastropub The Gage, and finally Nobu, where he ran the rooftop sushi bar and helped push nightly covers from 400 to 650. The 64-seat restaurant he opened trades on that pedigree, with wagyu skewers and otoro on the menu and a reservation list that, by most accounts, fills fast on weekends.

A few blocks over on Vernon Avenue, Elyon opened this past fall after Glencoe trustees approved its liquor license at their October 16, 2025 meeting. The Mediterranean restaurant leans into a tasting-menu format and the kind of polished, sit-down atmosphere that rewards planning ahead rather than walking in.

Both are genuinely good additions to the village. Neither one does what Meg's did.

Guildhall Already Set the Direction

This shift didn't start with Meg's closing. Guildhall has been operating at 694 Vernon Avenue since 2013, and its menu already blurs the line between American bistro and Japanese small plates, pairing Neapolitan-style pizza and burgers with a rotating sushi and sashimi list called Tori Dasu. Glencoe residents have had a taste for elevated, reservation-worthy dining for over a decade. RDK Sushi and Elyon didn't create that appetite. They just filled in the gaps it left in a village where nearly every dinner option now assumes you've called ahead.

The Golf Course Is Building the Missing Piece

The one project working against that trend sits on Westley Road, next to the Chicago Botanic Garden, and it has nothing to do with downtown's restaurant corridor.

Glencoe voters approved an $18 million bond referendum in April 2023 to replace the Glencoe Golf Club's clubhouse, a building that had served golfers since the course opened its first nine holes in 1922. Crews demolished the century-old structure in a single day in May 2025, and the replacement, designed by FGM Architects in a Prairie style meant to nod at Frank Lloyd Wright's North Shore legacy, has been rising ever since. The plans call for a full-service, year-round restaurant with an indoor dining room and central fireplace, a west-facing outdoor terrace for sunset views, and what officials are calling Glencoe's first sports bar, complete with televisions and casual seating.

The village board picked its food service operator in August 2026: Housepitality Grill House Group, which already runs Grill House and Cabo Grill in Northbrook and Backyard Grill in Highland Park. That matters if you live in Glencoe, because it means you can drive ten minutes in either direction right now and get a preview of what's coming to Westley Road: burgers, a kids' menu, and a room built for walking in without a reservation. Village President Howard Roin called the vendor agreement "a big step" and "very exciting" when trustees approved it.

The project hasn't come cheap or come easy. The construction contract has grown to $15.7 million after six separate change orders since March 2025, the most recent tied to a wet summer and an unexpected underground storage tank crews found mid-project. As of a late-August update, officials were targeting September 11, 2026 for substantial completion, with final inspections scheduled for the first week of the month and roughly a week and a half built in to address anything inspectors flag. That date has already come and gone by the time you're reading this, which means the clubhouse is either open or close enough that the difference is a matter of days, not months. Starting in 2027, the vendor will pay the village a base fee plus a share of food, alcohol, and catering revenue, with all private room rental fees going straight to the village.

The club remains open to the public with no membership required, same as it's always been.

Where Each Seat in Town Fits

What This Means If You Live Here

If you're planning a night out that requires a sitter and a reservation, downtown Glencoe now has three strong options within a few blocks of each other. If you want the kind of easy, unplanned dinner that Meg's used to handle, that seat isn't on Park Avenue or Vernon Avenue anymore. It's on Westley Road, in a building that spent over a year as a construction site before it became a restaurant.

That's not a complaint about the new restaurants. RDK Sushi and Elyon are exactly the kind of additions a growing dining scene should attract, and Guildhall proved over a decade ago that Glencoe would support that level of ambition. It's just worth knowing, if you live here, that the map of where to eat has shifted along with the map of what kind of night you're planning. For more on how the rest of the village's calendar fits together, our Glencoe neighborhood guide and our look at a typical weekend day in town cover the ground this piece doesn't.

Details on the clubhouse project, including monthly construction updates, are available through the Glencoe Golf Club's own project page and through The Record North Shore's coverage of the August 2026 board meeting.

Whether you're deciding where to eat next week or thinking further ahead about a move to a village where the restaurant scene keeps evolving, The Shore Group knows this stretch of the North Shore block by block. Work With Us when you're ready to talk about what living here actually looks like.