Highwood and Highland Park Are Both Getting New Restaurants This Year, Just Not the Same Way

Drive south on Waukegan Avenue through Highwood on a Friday night and you will pass a valet line outside Del Rio, string lights over the patio at Miramar Bistro, and a build-out that has been going up for the better part of a year at 250 Waukegan. Ten minutes later, turn onto Central Avenue in downtown Highland Park and the storefronts read differently. A steakhouse just opened where a Chinese restaurant used to be. A sports bar just opened where a Central Asian restaurant used to be, in a space that was a sports bar once before that too.

Both towns are having a restaurant moment in 2026. Neither is having the same one.

The Same Ten Minutes, Two Different Restaurant Economies

Highwood has spent decades building a food scene the way a coral reef builds itself, one small family-owned business at a time, until the density became the point. Del Rio has served classic Italian fare on Green Bay Road since 1923. Froggy's French Cafe opened in 1980 and is still turning out the same cozy dinner service. Toffee Traditions, Broken Tee Brewing Company, 28 Mile Distilling Co, and the coffee shop Tala Coffee Roasters, set inside a former fire station, all sit within a few blocks of each other. Jennifur Condon, executive director of the Highwood Chamber of Commerce, put the effect of that density plainly when she talked about what happens if your first choice is full on a given night.

"The best thing about Highwood is, if you happen to be there and you don't have a reservation, you go to Disotto for instance and they don't have a table, there's all these other restaurants at the same tier that you can go to without having to go down to the city."

That is not a marketing line. It is a description of what decades of organic restaurant growth actually buys a town: redundancy. Highland Park does not have that same backup layer yet, and the way its newest restaurants are arriving shows exactly why.

Highwood Already Had the Depth Bench

The biggest name headed to Highwood still has not opened. Avec, the James Beard-winning Mediterranean restaurant from One Off Hospitality, the Chicago group behind The Publican and Big Star, announced its move into the former Warehouse Boxing Gym site at 250 Waukegan Ave back in September 2025, with an original target of spring 2026. That date has slipped. As of late April 2026, One Off Hospitality was still finalizing plans, having just closed on an adjacent parcel at 244 Waukegan to add private dining, dry storage, a cooler, and dedicated parking to the main 115-seat, roughly 5,000-square-foot space designed by Thomas Schlesser. If you have been checking the windows on your evening walk expecting to see tables inside, the delay is real, not a rumor.

Chef Paul Kahan has been candid about why avec picked the North Shore over another Chicago neighborhood. He pointed to the cost of operating in the city and to the yearslong construction on the Kennedy Expressway as reasons to bring the restaurant north instead, and noted that the Metra's Union Pacific North line runs directly from the original West Loop location to Highwood, meaning regulars can make the trip without touching a car. It is a rare case of a beloved city restaurant expanding because the suburb offered less friction, not more prestige.

While avec finishes construction, two smaller, resident-founded openings have already filled in around it. Pelago Café opened this spring near the Highwood Metra stop, founded by cousins Mada Ugolini Hitchmough and Ruthie Amidei, both Highwood residents whose family roots trace to Emilia-Romagna, where Hitchmough's father worked as a baker before immigrating. And a bit further up Green Bay Road, Deere Park has been running since April 2025 in a converted auto repair garage, from chef Todd Stein and restaurateur Josh Kaplan, two childhood friends from Highland Park who built a brasserie menu around dishes like a butterflied branzino and a burger Stein calls his own. Both openings slid into a scene that already had the infrastructure, the walkable blocks, the loyal repeat diners, to absorb something new without anyone needing to manufacture demand for it.

Highland Park Is Buying Its Way Into the Conversation

Highland Park's restaurant news this year tells a different story, and the numbers behind it say more than the openings themselves.

The Barn Steakhouse held its grand opening on February 16, 2026, at 1900 First Street, in the former Little Szechwan space near Central Avenue. It comes from Amy Morton, daughter of Arnie Morton of Morton's Steakhouse, expanding her Evanston concept into a second location with curved red banquettes, a zinc bar, and a speakeasy planned for the alley behind it. Morton has said opening the Highland Park location was expensive, and those costs were offset in part by a $750,000 incentive from the city of Highland Park, specifically structured to draw a recognizable chef and restaurant into downtown.

That incentive matters more than it might first appear. Highwood's restaurant density built up over a century without needing a city to write a check for it. Highland Park, competing for the same caliber of restaurant, is doing it with direct municipal investment.

The other big Highland Park opening this year shows the flip side of that same dynamic: turnover rather than density. Highland Bar and Kitchen opened May 8, 2026, in the plaza at 1855 Deerfield Road, replacing Ordo Restaurant, a Central Asian concept that closed less than two weeks earlier, on April 26. General manager Dee Yu described the twelve-day turnaround as nerve-racking, and the space itself has a longer memory than either tenant. Longtime locals will recognize it as the old home of Player's Grill, meaning this single storefront has now cycled through at least three different concepts. Yu's read on what the neighborhood wanted was simple: a sports bar with live MLB, NBA, MLS, and UFC coverage, wood-fired Neapolitan pizza, and a full bar. The first weekend was, in his words, fully packed.

Where Highwood added restaurants to an already deep bench, Highland Park is replacing what did not work in the same handful of retail plazas, sometimes more than once.

What This Means for the Next Six Weeks

Regardless of which downtown you find yourself in more often, the calendar over the next six weeks gives you real reasons to be out.

• The Highwood Evening Gourmet Market runs its final Wednesday of the season on August 26, from 4:30 to 9 p.m., two days from now. If you have been meaning to go, this week is the last one.
• Nashwood takes over Highwood for Labor Day weekend, September 4 through 6.
• The Great Highwood Pumpkin Fest, including the Community Night and Opening Carnival, runs Thursday, October 1, with the festival itself continuing October 2 through 4.

None of that requires driving into the city, and increasingly, neither does dinner. Todd Stein put it simply when he opened Deere Park: fewer people in the northern suburbs are trekking downtown to eat well, because the food downtown is starting to show up here first.

The two towns are answering that shift differently. Highwood is adding to a system that already has slack built into it. Highland Park is paying to catch up, replacing storefronts as fast as it fills them, betting that a $750,000 incentive and a recognizable last name can build density faster than a century did in Highwood. Worth knowing next time you are deciding which direction to drive for dinner, and worth watching if you are paying attention to how downtown Highland Park keeps evolving.

If you want a closer read on what is happening in specific pockets of Highland Park, including how these changes ripple into the surrounding blocks, The Shore Group keeps a running local view of the towns we work in every day. Reach out any time you want a conversation grounded in what is actually happening on these streets, not just what the listing photos show.