When Chicago-based restaurant mogul Rich Melman was considering opening an eatery in Oak Brook in the early 1990s, he didn’t bother with marketing surveys. The founder and chairman of Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises simply paid a visit to Oakbrook Center mall.
“I wasn’t familiar with the area,” said Melman, who lives on the North Shore. “But some friends of ours said, `Rich, you’ve got to come out to Oak Brook and take a look.’ So I did, and I could tell just by looking at the stores and the people who were walking around that it was a pretty affluent area, really hip. You don’t always find that in the suburbs.”
Maggiano’s, Lettuce Entertain You’s first venture in the Oak Brook-Hinsdale area, opened in 1993 at Oakbrook Center. Since then, Lettuce has opened a Corner Bakery in Hinsdale and four more restaurants at Oakbrook Center, including an Italian dining spot called Antico Posto, launched in October 1999. Combined seating totals more than 1,000.
“The (Oak Brook-Hinsdale) demographics are right, and we do extremely well,” said Melman, who declined to discuss revenues or the number of customers served. “People in the area understand quality.”
These are tasty times across the country for the restaurant industry. A strong economy and too-busy-to-cook consumers have fueled rising revenues for the last nine years, and record sales of $376 billion are predicted for 2000, according to the National Restaurant Association, based in Washington. With continued growth in what the association terms the “prime restaurant patron” segment–consumers with annual household incomes of $40,000 or more–it’s hardly surprising that Melman and others describe the state of dining in the Hinsdale-Oak Brook region as especially healthy.
Median 1998 household income was $102,653 in Hinsdale and $181,418 in Oak Brook, making the area particularly appetizing for restaurateurs, despite high rents and Hinsdale’s lack of liquor licenses.
“There has been a lot of growth in restaurants in this area in the last five years or so,” said Kathy Spencer, assistant director of the Oak Brook-based DuPage Convention and Visitors Bureau. “Drury Lane dinner theater (in adjacent Oakbrook Terrace) also has become a very big destination in DuPage County.” (See accompanying story.)
No trade organization or local chamber of commerce comprehensively tracks restaurant activity in the Oak Brook-Hinsdale area. Yellow Pages listings in a recent Oak Brook-Hinsdale phone book indicate there are about 25 restaurants in Oak Brook and more than 15 in Hinsdale, ranging from McDonald’s fast-food franchises to jackets-required dinner spots.
Though no comprehensive statistics exist on how much restaurants contribute to the local economy in each area, the most recent figures available show that the Village of Oak Brook received $848,000 in 1998 sales tax revenues generated by local eating and drinking establishments. The figure represented about 7.6 percent of the village’s total sales tax income, said Oak Brook Director of Finance Darrell Langlois.
Hinsdale received $152,995 in restaurant sales tax revenues for calendar year 1998, said David Cook, director of finance for the village. Cook said the figure represented just more than 9 percent of total sales tax revenues received by the village.
Each administrator said that the income from sales tax revenues generated by eating and drinking establishments in his village had remained steady or risen slightly in the last few years.
In Hinsdale, where the arrival of chains such as Starbucks in the downtown area has driven up rents in recent years, the end of 1999 brought with it one major casualty. Tommy R’s Italia, a popular Italian restaurant that offered takeout and casual eat-in dining, closed after more than nine years in business. Chef-owner Tommy Romano blamed high overhead, but he added that he might have been able to make a go of it if his establishment had a liquor license.
But the chef-owners of two of the village’s newer restaurants said they didn’t see downtown Hinsdale rents or lack of liquor licenses as a major problem. Salbute, a 55-seat, Mexican restaurant that opened in late 1997 to widespread acclaim and attracts diners from Chicago and distant suburbs, allows patrons to bring their own liquor. Giuliano’s, a gourmet pizza and pasta restaurant launched in 1998, seats 12 and does mostly delivery/takeout business.
“It would be nice to have the income (from selling drinks), but we also like not having the liability,” said Salbute pastry chef and co-owner Jana Amsler. “And we’re doing well. We were fortunate to get a lot of good press after we opened, and you can’t get in now without a reservation. On a really busy night, we have served as many as 283 people.”
Amsler, who lives in Winfield, said that she and business partner/executive chef Edgar Rodriguez of Chicago chose Hinsdale because of the area’s relative affluence and sophistication.
“My father-in-law has been a doctor in Hinsdale for 35 years, so I am familiar with the economics,” Amsler said. “We knew people around here would spend money on good-quality food and were not afraid to try new things.”
Rodriguez’s more unusual dishes include Chilean sea bass topped with a sauce that includes roasted tomatillos and apricot wine; such fare is especially popular with customers, Amsler said.
Giuliano’s chef and co-owner Miklos Weisz said that he and chef-owner Ken Heimke believed Hinsdale would be especially receptive to a gourmet pizza and pasta spot. Both were familiar with the area because they and their wives grew up in Elmhurst, Weisz said.
“I was hesitant at first about opening a pizza place because my culinary training was more upscale, but we thought there was a void in Hinsdale we could fill,” added Weisz, whose specialties include a pizza Margherita that is topped with goat cheese, plum tomatoes, fresh basil and roasted garlic and a chicken Vesuvio with garlic and lemon sauce.
Weisz said that Giuliano’s fills about 500 orders each week; about 60 percent are takeouts, and the rest are deliveries in Hinsdale, southern Oak Brook, Clarendon Hills, northern Burr Ridge, Westmont and Western Springs. The restaurant, which also does catering, has three full-time and 10 part-time employees.
“We’re not in the best location in the world,” observed Weisz, who leases a storefront in a well-traveled alley near the train station. “But a lot of people hear about us through word of mouth, and the business is growing. We wanted to start simple, but eventually we might evolve into something with more eat-in dining. Hinsdale has been good to us.”
