Why It Took Three Restaurants to Fill One Corner of Skokie Boulevard

"So many people walk in and ask when we're going to open," Danny Shamoon told The Record North Shore in late September, standing inside a building that still isn't finished. He wasn't describing a grand opening. He was describing a construction site that people keep mistaking for one, because after six years of walking or driving past it, Wilmette residents have started treating any sign of life at 200 Skokie Blvd as news.

That reaction says something the calendar alone can't. This isn't a neighborhood that forgot about a vacant lot. It's one that has been keeping score.

The building at 200 Skokie Blvd was Bakers Square until 2019. Since then it's sat empty through two separate attempts to bring it back, both of which collapsed before opening day, and a third that appears to be a few weeks from finally getting there. Understanding why the first two failed, and why the third one didn't, tells you more about how downtown Wilmette actually works than any list of what's currently open for dinner.

Two Proposals That Didn't Survive Contact With Wilmette

The first serious attempt came from Murray Bros. Caddyshack, which went through a significant chunk of the village's public review process in 2021 and 2022 before ownership scrapped the plan mid-process. No public vote killed it. It simply didn't make it to the finish line.

The second attempt was more concrete, and more contested. McDonald's proposed a 4,100-square-foot restaurant with a drive-thru for the site, and company estimates presented to the village put the location at roughly 1,000 transactions a day, with 70 to 80 percent of customers expected to use the drive-thru lane. That estimate is what sank it. Both residents and village officials raised concerns about what that kind of volume would do to a corner already carrying commuter and school traffic, and in January 2024 the Village Board voted unanimously to deny the proposal.

Two well-capitalized national and regional concepts, two years apart, both walked away from the same address. That's not a story about low interest in Wilmette real estate. It's a story about a specific site failing a specific test twice.

What Actually Got Approved

Danny Shamoon isn't a national chain. He's a Glenview resident who owns a personal training studio in Northfield, and he became Buttermilk Cafe's first franchisee after eating at the chain's Vernon Hills location and asking a manager whether the concept was ever going to expand that way. Buttermilk opened its first restaurant in Geneva in 2014 and has since added locations in Downers Grove, Naperville and Vernon Hills. Wilmette will be its fifth, and its first franchise.

What Shamoon proposed was the opposite of the McDonald's plan: a sit-down breakfast and lunch restaurant, no drive-thru, seating for roughly 180 guests split across a main dining room, a sun room and a patio. When Wilmette's Appearance Review Commission previewed the design in April 2025, Commissioner Douglas Johnson called it "beautifully designed" and said it "honors what's been there and what we've all been missing for years." Village Manager Mike Braiman used a similar word for the outcome, calling it "an outstanding result" and adding that the village was "ecstatic to have Buttermilk Cafe join the Wilmette community."

The village didn't just approve the plan. It backed it financially. Trustees unanimously approved an economic incentive agreement in 2025 that allows Buttermilk to receive up to $150,000 in sales tax revenue remittance over a maximum of ten years, structured so the village collects the first $20,000 in sales tax dollars, Buttermilk collects the next $30,000, and the two split what comes after that. Wilmette had already said no once, at no cost, to a national chain's traffic pattern. This time it said yes and put money behind it.

As of late September, Shamoon still hadn't announced a firm opening date, citing weather delays on the buildout and a determination to open with the space finished rather than rush it. "We want to extremely apologize about the wait but we want to deliver a finished product," he said, adding that the ownership team was "on the tail end of everything."

The Site Was Never the Problem

Here's what six years of vacancy at one corner obscures if you only look at that corner: downtown Wilmette wasn't sitting still while 200 Skokie Blvd stayed empty. Sophia Steak opened in 2020 and became enough of a fixture that it's now described as a North Shore favorite for special-occasion dinners. Newer additions like Pit & Tap and EvaDean's Bakery & Café filled in behind it, along with Vi's Vietnamese Kitchen, adding to a downtown district that now counts close to twenty restaurants and cafés within a few walkable blocks, many of them opened since 2020.

That contrast is the real information here. A neighborhood that fills storefronts quickly everywhere else, but takes six years and two failed proposals to fill one corner, isn't dealing with a demand problem. It's applying a filter, and the filter has less to do with what a business sells than with what kind of traffic it adds to a specific stretch of road. Skokie Boulevard carries different pressure than the walkable core around the Metra station. A sit-down concept with a sunroom and a patio cleared that bar. A high-volume drive-thru didn't.

Two Calendars, Same Season

The timing lands in a way that's easy to miss if you're only watching one address. The Wilmette French Market, which set up every Saturday morning east of the Metra station since April 18, runs through October 31 this year. By the time Buttermilk is likely to open, the market's Saturday morning crowd on Green Bay Road will be down to its final weeks, and the corridor's outdoor-season rhythm will be handing off to whatever fills the calendar once the market tables come down.

That handoff is normal for a village built around a fairly tight seasonal cycle: outdoor markets and evening concerts through the warmer months, sit-down dining and indoor gathering spots picking up as the weather turns. What's unusual this year is that one of downtown's most-watched vacancies is finally closing at almost the exact moment one of its most reliable outdoor fixtures is winding down for the year. Residents who've spent six years walking past a shuttered building on Skokie Boulevard are about to watch it fill in right as the French Market stalls get packed away until spring.

The corner didn't take six years because nobody wanted it. It took six years because Wilmette was waiting for something that fit, and it was willing to pay to make sure that once it found it, the fit stuck.

HL2R Group pays attention to corners like this because a filled storefront tells you something about how a block actually lives, not just what it's worth on paper. If you're curious what a change like this means for your part of Wilmette, HL2R Group is happy to talk it through.