Downtown Wilmette Just Wrote a New Rule to Keep Up With Its Own Restaurant Boom

"So many people walk in and ask when we're going to open," Danny Shamoon said of the crowds already showing up at 200 Skokie Blvd., where he's putting the last touches on Buttermilk Café. As of late September, the doors are still closed. Parking lot striping, equipment delivery, the small stuff that takes longer than anyone plans for. But the building behind him has a longer story than one café's countdown to opening day. It sat empty for six years and outlasted two other companies' plans before Shamoon's family got the lease, and it's only one storefront in a run of downtown Wilmette addresses that have changed hands in the last thirteen months.

The clearest sign of how much that stretch has shifted doesn't show up in a press release. It shows up in the village's own liquor code, which until last winter didn't have a category built for what Jason Sander wanted to do with his new lounge, The Mette. Wilmette's licensing system was built around restaurants where alcohol sales are incidental to food. Sander's plan flipped that: a cocktail-first lounge with a kitchen built to support the bar, not the other way around. Trustees had to create a new license classification to allow it, setting the fee at $6,000, a step above the $5,000 ceiling that had applied to every other license class in the village.

A Butcher Counter Becomes a Cocktail Lounge

Al's Meat Market ran in the heart of downtown Wilmette for more than two decades before owner Joe Spera closed it in early January 2026 to retire. The shop traced back further than that. Spera's father, Al, opened the original Al's Meat Market in Winnetka in the 1960s. When the storefront at 1165 Wilmette Ave. came open, Sander, a lifelong Wilmette resident, signed a lease that commits his ownership group to invest between $350,000 and $550,000 in demolition, permitting, and buildout. Property owner Michael Chookaszian is also putting money in and holding a minority stake. Rent on the space starts at a minimum of $5,500 a month.

Sander told village officials he wanted The Mette to feel like a sophisticated addition to the suburbs without losing the block's character, and by August the restaurant was already taking reservations, open Tuesday through Thursday from 5 p.m. and Friday and Saturday from 3 p.m. Getting there took more than a lease and a buildout. It took the village rewriting a rule that had never needed rewriting before, because downtown Wilmette had never had a bar where the drink menu, not the dinner menu, was the main event.

The Six-Year Vacancy Two Other Concepts Couldn't Fill

The building at 200 Skokie Blvd. has been empty since 2019. Two separate proposals to redevelop the site fell apart before Buttermilk got involved: a McDonald's location pitched in 2023 and 2024, and a Murray Bros. Caddyshack concept pitched in 2021 and 2022. Neither made it to an opening day.

What finally moved the needle was a village economic incentive. Wilmette trustees approved an agreement with Shamoon and Buttermilk that remits up to $150,000 in sales tax revenue over a maximum of ten years, structured in tiers: the village keeps the first $20,000 in sales tax dollars generated, Buttermilk gets the next $30,000, and anything beyond that gets split between the two. Buttermilk itself started in 2014 in Geneva and has since opened in Downers Grove, Naperville, and Vernon Hills, all running the same daily schedule of 7 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Shamoon has said rain delayed the buildout and that he doesn't want to open until it's right. "There's a lot of excitement right now," he said. "We're on the tail end of everything."

What's Actually Open on Wilmette Avenue Right Now

Small Cheval's arrival took almost as long as Buttermilk's. The village sold the 1874 depot building to the ownership group in March 2023, and the opening slid from a projected spring 2024 date to fall, then to the following summer before doors finally opened in August 2025. It's the first North Shore location for the Au Cheval spinoff, which otherwise operates only inside the city, in Logan Square, Wrigleyville, Fulton Market, Old Town, and the Loop.

The Plaza Is Getting the Headlines. The Street Is Doing the Regulatory Work.

Plaza del Lago's transformation under owner WS Development has drawn most of the attention downtown, and it's easy to see why. In June, the company confirmed thirteen incoming businesses for the shopping center, nine of which hadn't been publicly known before, headlined by Oscar de la Renta, LoveShackFancy, Peter Millar, and Hill House Home, joining previously reported arrivals like Hermès, Space 519, and rag & bone. The Henry landed in a stand-alone building in the plaza's northwest corner, a space that had most recently held John Plunkett Interiors before that shop relocated to Winnetka, and before that was home to Convito Cafe & Market until the market moved to its current spot within the center.

That's one landlord executing one leasing strategy. What's happening a few blocks away on Wilmette Avenue is a different mechanism entirely: family businesses closing on their own timelines, independent property owners signing new leases, and a village government stepping in with tax incentives on one end of the street and a brand-new ordinance on the other. Two separate processes, pointed at the same outcome, a downtown with more reasons to be there after 6 p.m. than it had two years ago.

What It Means for a Downtown Wilmette Weekend This Fall

Both of downtown's biggest annual draws already happened this year. The Wilmette Art Fair filled Wilmette and Central avenues with free, two-day access to artist booths, food, and live music on August 1 and 2. Four weeks later, the fifth annual Wilmette Block Party ran from noon to 10 p.m. on August 29, adding a synchronized drone show for the first time after a 2025 edition that brought in 22 sponsors and raised close to $47,000 for Park District programming.

Those festivals close out downtown's summer calendar, but they run through the same handful of blocks that are now filling back in for the other fifty weekends a year. A dinner-and-drinks loop that didn't exist eighteen months ago is fully walkable now: a burger at Small Cheval before its 9 p.m. close, a cocktail afterward at the village's newest lounge, and, once Buttermilk finally opens its doors, a slower Sunday breakfast without leaving Wilmette Avenue at all.

The Leigh Marcus Team tracks which downtown Wilmette storefronts change hands and why, because what a village is willing to subsidize, rezone, or write a new ordinance for tells you as much about a block's direction as any listing photo. If you're weighing what a home near Wilmette Avenue or Plaza del Lago is actually worth in this environment, Book a Consultation and we'll walk through it with you.