Walk the green at Market Square on a Tuesday evening and you will pass the fountain, the clock tower, the scaffolding wrapped around one wing of the century-old facade, and a run of national names that have anchored this square for decades. Keep walking north on Western Avenue, past the point where the square's brick and limestone give way to an ordinary retail strip, and you will find the restaurant most Lake Forest residents have been talking about since it opened. It is not inside the landmark. It is three blocks up the street, in a storefront that shares a stretch of Western with a sushi bar and a pizza place that have been there for years.
That gap between where the money is going and where the food is actually good is the story of downtown Lake Forest right now.
The Square Everyone Photographs Is Getting a Facelift, Not a Menu
Market Square has earned every bit of its reputation. Architect Howard Van Doren Shaw designed the U-shaped complex in 1916 as one of the first shopping centers in the country built around the automobile, and it still opens directly onto the Metra station the way it did when commuters first stepped off the train and saw it. Investment firm L3 Capital bought the roughly 100,000-square-foot property for $35.5 million, and the firm's principal, Michael Schreiber, called it the most iconic property on the North Shore when the deal closed.
Since then, L3 has brought in OKW Architects to lead a restoration built around facade repair, building-systems upgrades, signage, and accessibility work, the kind of project that takes years and shows up gradually as scaffolding moves from one storefront to the next. It is a retail-preservation play, not a dining expansion. The tenant list at the Square still leans hard toward apparel and home goods: Williams-Sonoma, J.Crew, Talbots, Bluemercury, Free People, alongside Lake Forest originals like Kiddles Sporting Goods, which has held its spot since 1968, and The Lake Forest Shop, a family-owned clothing store running since 1922. The one significant dining addition inside the Square in recent years has been Le Colonial, the Vietnamese restaurant chain that opened there in 2022 with locations from New York to Houston.
That is the honest read on the Square right now: a careful, capital-intensive restoration of a National Register landmark, with its restaurant roster essentially unchanged. If you are waiting for the historic core of downtown to deliver the next big opening, you may be waiting through several more seasons of scaffolding.
The Food Everyone's Actually Talking About Is a Few Blocks Up Western
Meanwhile, the interesting food news landed somewhere plainer. Chef Bruno Abate opened Follia at 950 N. Western Avenue in June of 2025, and it has become the Lake Forest dining conversation without any help from the Square's spotlight. Abate already runs Tocco in Winnetka, which he opened in 2019, and Follia in Lake Forest is his second act on the North Shore, a callback to the original Follia he opened in Chicago's Fulton Market district roughly 25 years ago.
Abate is candid about why he did it. He told the Lake Forest/Lake Bluff Chamber that friends in town had been asking him for years to bring something authentic there, and he found the space with help from the Altounian family. His chef, Domenico Acampora, trained in Italy and worked at the original Follia before coming to Lake Forest, and Abate has said the restaurant sources everything from Italy down to the glassware, made on the island of Murano near Venice.
"I kind of need a challenge in my life," Abate said, describing why he took on a second restaurant so soon after establishing Tocco.
What matters for a resident walking Western Avenue is where this all sits. Follia is not tucked into a purpose-built dining destination. It shares a stretch of the street with Kuro Bistro, the sushi and hibachi spot that has drawn a loyal following for years, and with Donati's Pizza, a longtime local pizzeria. This is an ordinary commercial block, not a curated retail environment, and the newest chef-driven opening in town chose it anyway.
That is not new for Lake Forest. The Left Bank, a hot dog and sandwich counter on Bank Lane known for its Chicago-style dogs, has operated since 1963 in a location that has nothing to do with the Square's architecture or address. Some of the food this town cares most about has always lived outside the postcard version of downtown.
Abate's Lake Forest work also carries a piece of his broader story. He founded Recipe for Change, a culinary program inside the Cook County Jail that he started in 2014 after years of similar work at a juvenile detention facility. He has raised roughly $10 million to run it and received a $50,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation to help build a professional kitchen there. Of the roughly 6,000 detainees who have gone through the program, fewer than 60 have returned to prison. It is worth knowing that context if you sit down at Follia, because Abate has built a version of Recipe for Change support into each of his restaurants.
What This Means If You Walk This Stretch Regularly
Here is the practical takeaway for anyone who lives here and treats downtown as a daily loop rather than a destination to evaluate. The Square's restoration is a multi-year infrastructure and preservation project, and it is worth watching for what it does to the retail mix over time, but it is not going to produce a wave of new restaurants inside the historic buildings anytime soon. The dining upgrade that residents are actually experiencing right now is happening on the plainer stretch of Western Avenue, in a building that also houses a sushi counter and a pizzeria that predate any of this attention.
If you have not made it to Follia yet, it has just passed its first year in town, which is usually the point where a new restaurant in a small market either settles into being a genuine local fixture or starts to fade. Based on what residents have been saying about it since it opened, this one has settled in.
If you are the kind of person who tracks these shifts because you are weighing your own next move in Lake Forest, whether that is staying put and enjoying what is changing around you or thinking ahead to a different street entirely, Spacematch Inc. pays attention to exactly this kind of detail. We Spacematch you to the right home.
