The ghosts of Chicago restaurants past

For more than a hundred years, Dinkel’s Bakery was the hookup for baked goods in Lakeview and Roscoe Village; its iconic sign served as a beacon for everyday carb-seekers and musicians loitering at the Chicago Music Exchange across the street.

Dinkel’s closed its doors in 2022. Look through the storefront windows today and you’ll see a mess of old equipment, garbage, and other wayward debris. Less than a block away, what was once McGuigan’s Irish Pub still has dusty beer bottles visible through its windows.

Whether it’s Pick Me Up Cafe’s old Lakeview location, Leona’s in Rogers Park, or Marcello’s Father & Son in Logan Square, it seems like one is never more than a Malört bottle’s throw from a shuttered restaurant, cafe, or bar. Restaurants close for a variety of reasons, but what keeps the buildings vacant long after the tenant moves out?

Allan Perales, chief operating officer of commercial real estate firm Goldstreet Partners, says food service spaces can remain vacant for years for reasons ranging from immovably high rent to stalled redevelopment plans to pending legal disputes. It’s also not uncommon for prospective tenants to avoid certain buildings due to stigma, or for spaces to remain empty for years simply due to poor marketing on the landlord’s part.

“Challenges with landlords, such as reputational issues or difficulty during negotiations, can also prolong vacancies,” says Perales. “A landlord–tenant relationship is similar to a partnership. It works well when things are going smoothly, but difficulties arise when challenges like late payments occur.”

Just one of these issues can keep a tenantless storefront vacant for years at a time—a neighborhood haunt turned into a neighborhood specter.

Owners of storefronts that sit vacant for more than 30 days are required by the city to register the property and to follow insurance and maintenance guidelines laid out by the Chicago Department of Buildings. City data shows 37,088 vacant and abandoned buildings have been reported to Chicago’s nonemergency 311 call center since 2010. Additionally, 5,004 vacant building violations have been reported since 2011.

The Loop saw its all-time highest retail vacancy rate in 2023, at over 30 percent; it was the culmination of a four-year trend beginning in 2019 and largely attributed to the pandemic. The city does not track data on the specific number of restaurant and building vacancies, and violations reported by citizens only tell so much of the story.

A space will sometimes be leased but still sit inactive for years. In July 2023, developer PCR Group submitted plans for the Dinkel’s space to be redeveloped into a 66,000-square-foot mixed-use building.

Nicole Alexander, founder and principal designer of Siren Betty Design, says empty restaurant and food-service spaces can be especially prone to poor aging.

“Moisture is the most immediate threat when a space is vacant,” says Alexander. “Damage can show up after a couple months or even weeks of being empty. Also rodents. I’ve never known a restaurant to do a deep clean before they close permanently.”

Food waste is another major issue, especially in cases where a business is forced to close abruptly. When all Foxtrot stores simultaneously closed last April, Eater Chicago reported many stores still contained unsold inventory as late as October of that same year.

“After five years, the bar could be rotted, the drywall moldy, the doors and shelving warped, toilets and sinks stained, HVAC and pipes rusty, leather upholstery dried and cracked. After ten years, you probably need a whole new everything,” says Alexander.

She says extensive renovations can cost roughly $250–$450 per square foot.

“Surface damage is easy to see and also relatively easy to fix. It’s what’s hiding underneath that can really make or break a budget.”

“We’ve also worked on projects where our client is so excited about the space and the location,” she says. “But then we get in there and realize that there’s massive damage from a burst pipe, or the sewer lines are a disaster, or some other huge, expensive fix.”

It’s all a very roundabout way of saying: yes, space left to rot for a decade will suck to renovate.

Restaurateur Mike Chen, who also manages Kyuramen in River North, worked with Perales to purchase a space in River North that had sat vacant for more than a decade.

“I don’t know why [the building] was vacant for that long,” says Chen. “Maybe there were other interested parties, and they couldn’t come to the right terms. It’s a good space with a corner spot, very high visibility on LaSalle and Hubbard. . . . I knew there had been several changes of ownership.”

Chen says that the two-level space, formerly a restaurant called Vinyl, was well maintained by the landlord at the time it was purchased.

“Sadly, that’s not typically the case,” says Alexander. “In Chicago, landlords tend to own multiple properties, so they’re not always diligent about maintaining them in between tenants.”

As Chen prepares for renovation, he says his biggest expense will be the removal of a large iron hood left behind by the previous tenant.

“Yes, it’s very common for equipment to be left behind,” Alexander says. “Typically cooktops, hoods, and some bar equipment can be serviced and salvaged. But many times the equipment that has been left isn’t what the new tenant is looking for.”

Even if a space is maintained well enough to ward off decay, shifting building codes can still require prohibitively expensive renovations. “For example,” says Perales, “restaurants built in the 1990s might need to replace exhaust systems to meet current codes, and these costs can skyrocket, particularly in high-rise buildings.”

General contracting company Vero Design + Build cofounder Josh Veselsky notes that regardless of what shape it might be in, working with a space meant for food service is always preferable to converting a building into something food-service friendly.

“Oftentimes a vacant restaurant will have outdated construction that needs to be brought up to current code compliance or supplement with new technology, but a vacant restaurant usually ticks a lot more boxes than, say, a vacant currency exchange,” says Veselsky. “We’ve renovated banks, office spaces, retail stores, lofts, and even boats and churches into restaurant spaces, and the efforts and costs are always greater to bring restaurant-specific systems into a building that a restaurant did not previously inhabit.”

The Cook County Land Bank Authority (CCLBA) was created in 2013 to actively purchase vacant properties. Though abandoned restaurant spaces aren’t the organization’s primary focus, 2024 saw soul food and Jamaican restaurant Jerk Soule, originally a food truck, open inside an abandoned building in Ashburn, purchased through the CCLBA in 2021.

Jerk Soule’s founder Judith Smith opened the restaurant as a tribute to her late father, and the restaurant quickly became a welcome addition to the Ashburn food scene.

CCLBA executive director Jessica Caffrey told ABC7, “In the past, buildings like this would have sat vacant for ten or 15 years, but now with visionaries like Judith, it’s now a community asset.”

There’s no better space for a new restaurant than an old restaurant, and organizations like the CCLBA demonstrate that building upcycling programs can be effective. Not every aspiring restaurateur has the money to save an existing space, but if all of our friends can name at least one abandoned restaurant in their neighborhood, isn’t that a problem?