"I'm confident that the name, The Bagel, people will remember it."
— Marvin Barsky, as quoted by The Record North Shore
Marvin Barsky said that in March, months before he had a lease, a permit, or a finished kitchen. He's 81 years old and about to open his third restaurant in a Glenview storefront that didn't exist as a restaurant a year ago. By Labor Day, if the timeline holds, it will.
That single sentence is a decent summary of what's happening on Glenview Road right now. For the better part of three years, downtown Glenview has been a neighborhood defined by future tense: economic development agreements, forgivable loans, renderings taped to plywood. By late summer, a handful of those futures were converging, close enough together that a resident who hasn't walked down Glenview Road since spring would barely recognize the block.
A Timeline That Finally Converged
The first wave of this downtown push actually opened over a year ago. Jackman & Co., the upscale tavern from Ballyhoo Hospitality, opened on July 22, 2025. Hometown Coffee & Juice, the café chain with locations in Glencoe, Lake Forest, and Winnetka, followed that November. Ovvio Italian Taverna took over a former gas station on Waukegan Road and opened December 4, 2025, with a ribbon-cutting from the Glenview Chamber of Commerce.
Those three openings were spread across five months and felt, at the time, like separate stories. What's different about late summer 2026 is the compression:
- Foxtail at Glen View House opened to the public on August 20, after months of interior work and patio construction.
- Spiro's Deli, relocating from its longtime Waukegan Road spot, had targeted a mid-August opening at its new downtown address.
- The Bagel is aiming for Labor Day weekend at a storefront on the ground floor of a new apartment building.
Three projects that had each been "coming soon" on the village's own project pages for a year or more had been slated to open within the same four-week window. That's not a coincidence of scheduling so much as several separate incentive deals, each negotiated on its own timeline, finally maturing together.
The Building Where Glenview Signed Its Own Charter
Foxtail's new location matters for a reason that has nothing to do with the menu. The restaurant occupies the historic Glen View House building at 1843 Glenview Road, the same building where the village's charter was adopted and signed in 1899. It's Foxtail's third location, joining existing restaurants in Des Plaines and Downers Grove, and the operator has said it intends to preserve the building's name and history rather than rebrand it into something generic.
The menu leans Mediterranean with coastal touches: a shareable starter trio of hummus, labneh, and muhammara, grilled octopus, lobster dynamite, and a raw bar with oysters, tuna, and hamachi crudo. Hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 3 to 10 p.m. and Sunday from 3 to 9 p.m.
What makes this opening different from a typical new restaurant is the address itself. A building that has stood at the center of Glenview's civic identity for 127 years, and that spent recent years as a mostly unused historic property, is now the place where a resident makes a Friday reservation. Downtown's history and downtown's dinner plans are, for the first time in a while, the same building.
Eight Years Away, Labor Day Weekend Ahead
The Bagel's return is the more emotional of the two long-anticipated openings, mostly because it almost didn't happen at all, as The Record North Shore reported. The original Bagel Restaurant and Deli ran for 31 years inside Skokie's Old Orchard Mall before closing in 2018. Barsky, who later took over the deli's Lakeview location in 2023, spent years checking in with Old Orchard's ownership about a possible return, only to eventually learn there was no space for him there.
So he went looking elsewhere. Barsky toured potential sites in Highland Park, Winnetka, Wilmette, Glencoe, Northbrook, and Deerfield before landing on Glenview, and even that was closer to an accident than a plan. He and his soon-to-be general manager, Rocio Carreras, were driving to look at a different Glenview property when they passed an empty storefront downtown with a "For Lease" sign in the window.
That storefront is now a 5,000-square-foot space with room for roughly 150 customers, on the ground floor of a new apartment building a few blocks from the Metra station. Barsky has called the timeline tight, and Labor Day weekend is the target he's working toward. For a North Shore Jewish deli scene that Barsky has described as fading, the return of a restaurant with three decades of Old Orchard history behind it is a bigger local event than a single restaurant opening usually is.
The Deli That Chose Sidewalk Over Parking Lot
Spiro's Deli has been a Glenview fixture since 1962, most recently from a Waukegan Road location it held for 30 years. The move downtown wasn't the village's idea alone. The owners specifically wanted to be part of the downtown revitalization, and the village supported the relocation with a $595,000 loan structured to require ten years of continuous operation at the new site.
The new location, at 1880 Glenview Road across from the Glenview Public Library, trades a strip-mall parking lot for a downtown sidewalk. The build includes a deli counter, seating for 25, and a small outdoor patio, and the menu isn't changing: The Bomber, chicken pita, Italian beef, poor boys, and the usual roster of soups, salads, gyros, burgers, and hot dogs. Hours are extending to 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., longer than the old Waukegan Road hours, which matters for a downtown that's trying to hold onto foot traffic past the lunch rush.
Between Spiro's 64 years of history and Foxtail's 127-year-old building, the newest wave of downtown Glenview openings is leaning almost as hard on legacy as it is on novelty.
The New Neighbors Upstairs
None of this happens in a vacuum, and the timing lines up with another opening that isn't a restaurant at all. Cerca, a 62-unit apartment building at 1850 Glenview Road, held its ribbon-cutting on June 17 and welcomed its first residents two days later. Monthly rents there range from roughly $2,745 to $7,300, and the building sits directly above ground-floor retail space, steps from the Metra platform.
A downtown that adds 62 new households within walking distance of a restaurant corridor is a downtown with a built-in customer base for whatever opens next. Cerca's leasing team has been marketing "immediate access to newly opened restaurants" as a selling point since before most of those restaurants existed. The apartments and restaurants are part of the same downtown story.
What a Normal Week Downtown Looks Like Now
Put it together and the practical difference for a Glenview resident is simple: for the first time, a full day downtown doesn't require leaving a five-minute walk. Coffee at Hometown Coffee & Juice near the Metra station, lunch at Spiro's new counter, an early dinner at Jackman & Co. or Ovvio, and a reservation at Foxtail on the weekend, all inside the same compact stretch of Glenview Road. Add The Bagel over Labor Day weekend and the corridor has a deli at both ends of the day.
None of this happened by accident, and none of it happened quickly. The village has spent years and, by its own public accounting through late 2024, more than $13 million in grants and forgivable loans getting these specific storefronts filled. What's new isn't the investment. It's that the openings are clustered in a late-summer stretch, at locations close enough to walk between.
If you're already living in Glenview and wondering what else is shifting in the neighborhood beyond the restaurant scene, Maria Thanasouras has spent decades tracking how these North Shore communities actually change on the ground. Let's Connect if you'd like a longer conversation about what's happening in Glenview and across Chicagoland.
