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Did Logan Square just have a collective brain-meld that Hyde Park was the next thing? Hardly; both sets of restaurateurs were wooed by the University of Chicago, which is heavily involved in developing retail on 53rd Street near the university and trying to improve the area’s restaurant scene, with its sometimes likable, but decidedly trapped-in-a-70s-college-town vibe. Even if it means, basically, transplanting Logan Square to Hyde Park like they’re picking up a colony from Earth and dropping it on the moon. (It also meant ramming through a vote to make liquor sales legal after it was belatedly discovered that the precinct was dry.) Using restaurants as a tool of social engineering is hardly unusual—it’s part of any retail development—but we don’t often see someone shopping one part of town to create an instant hipster neighborhood somewhere else on quite this scale.
Michael Gebert: So how did these projects come about? You were approached by the University of Chicago?
So when they approached us, I was like, whatever, here’s more real estate people coming up saying, “Wouldn’t it be great for you to have a restaurant in Oak Park?” But as we did our due diligence, we found out that it was a serious project. A Whole Foods. An 18-story office tower moving all the administration over to 53rd street. There’s almost a billion dollars on the table that they’re going to put into Hyde Park. And at that point the momentum, the infrastructure, the larger grocery stores and soft retail were coming in and making the commitments, so we thought it was an appropriate time to make the move to Hyde Park.
It’s one of the tragedies of Hyde Park that you look back—we did a lot of research into the history—and it was the hottest place to be. Everyone was there. And we said to ourselves, this place is so beautiful—there’s so much historic architecture, there’s such a great population there. One thing I didn’t know is, per capita, there’s more money in Hyde Park than in Evanston. And the more we dug in, we thought that handmade, market-driven, simply made and delicious food at a reasonable price with great service, this could really change the dynamic down there.
