The Restaurant Industry Challenges That Led to the Recent Closure of Several North Shore Businesses

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On October 27, two North Shore hospitality businesses are closing their doors, one after more than a decade of existence, the other after less than a year in that location but more than a decade at its still successful flagship. Temperance Beer Co. became the first brewery in Evanston when it opened in 2013. An outpost of Honey Butter Fried Chicken that debuted at the beginning of the year in Glencoe was the popular brand’s first expansion beyond its Avondale restaurant, which also opened in 2013. Both will have their last day of service on the final Sunday in October.

“We’ve weathered a lot over the years, but in the end the long tail of Covid and its lasting changes it wrought with the spending, eating, and drinking habits of Americans has claimed another small, family-owned business,” Temperance founder Josh Gilbert wrote in an Instagram post announcing the brewery’s closure.

Honey Butter Fried Chicken co-owners Christine Cikowski and Josh Kulp are leaning into changes inaugurated by the pandemic, but that’s where they fell short with their Glencoe location. “We’re following the pandemic trends of seeing an increase in takeout and delivery and catering,” says Cikowski.

“One of the big things we rely on at this point is that takeout and delivery component,” adds Kulp. But the Glencoe location never had enough of those orders to allow it to survive, even as the in-person business there roughly matched dine-in business at the Avondale location, according to Kulp. He and Cikowski believe that – despite the research they did on the North Shore and with their delivery partners before opening – the specific location in Glencoe was the major failing.

“I think the suburbs are great,” says Kulp. “It turns out Glencoe is a beautiful, bustling, but small town, and there just wasn’t enough traffic for us to get folks from the other suburbs to come there.”

Methods of marketing that work in Avondale also proved less successful in the suburbs, Cikowski says. “It was challenging for us to get people to know that we were there. That’s a great lesson for us to learn. It’s just different from the city.”

Michael Lachowicz knows the restaurant business in the suburbs better than the city; he’s spent most of his decorated career as a chef and restaurateur serving them, most notably with a series of restaurants in Winnetka. “I’ve never been a city boy restaurant guy,” he says. But he, too, had to close a restaurant this year when it never became viable.

Fonda Cantina opened in early 2023 and closed this summer. It spotlighted the “abuelita”-style Mexican cooking of Lachowicz’s longtime partners Miguel Escobar and Sergio Angel. Lachowicz thought its location in downtown Evanston would provide a built-in customer base from nearby Northwestern University, particularly since Fonda included a bar. Like Kulp and Cikowski, he found that his expectations were never borne out.

“I just made the assumption that Northwestern’s campus would support us, and that was a bad assumption, because campus life has changed exponentially post-pandemic as well. People don’t leave campus like they used to,” he says. “Instead of looking deeper into that, I did the Superman stance, with a big ‘S’ on my chest and a cape, thinking, ‘I’m going to rescue this whole scenario.’ And that was just completely silly.”

He is now applying some of the lessons he learned from Fonda Cantina to open a new restaurant. Fondita Miguel will lean into the takeout, delivery, and catering that provide so much of Honey Butter Fried Chicken’s business in Avondale these days. With its location near the Winnetka Metra and New Trier Township High School and inexpensive prices enabled by the lower labor costs of a counter-service restaurant, Lachowicz believes Fondita’s chances of success are much higher.

He has also learned from his other restaurants, which have gone through various shifts since the outbreak of the pandemic in 2020. He closed his fine dining George Trois restaurant earlier this year to expand his more casual French brasserie Aboyer into the space, and has shifted both menus and hours to reflect people’s tastes and habits today. He removed luxury items – caviar, foie gras, lobster – from the menu and shifted the hours earlier, opening at 4:00 pm for a happy hour and closing reservations after 7:45 pm.

He had spent years trying to fill his restaurants for a second seating after the rush between 6:00 pm and 7:30 pm; now, he has finally realized he was being hardheaded, and has instead moved his hours in the opposite direction. “This is so counter-intuitive, it almost makes me scratch my head,” he says; it goes against conventional restaurant business wisdom. But his profit margins are up.

“I figured out that my first impulse and my first thought is not always correct. It doesn’t matter how long I’ve been doing this, that doesn’t mean s--t,” he says. As he gets older, he has realized that he needs more input from others to succeed and even make enough money to save up for retirement; hence the partnership with Angel and Escobar. “I need other people to tell me, ‘You’re not thinking straight on this particular point, you’re being delusional about this.’”

Such input is valuable and necessary because the hospitality industry is a different place today than it was five years ago, whether in the city or the suburbs. Creative people in the business are testing out new models and tweaking old ones; owners who refuse to change might not survive.

“Labor costs, food costs, packaging costs, garbage pick-up costs, recycling pick-up costs, compost pick-up costs – every possible cost is higher now,” Kulp says. “We try to offer the pay and benefits that we can to our team and use the good ingredients that we use, and that is certainly more challenging now than it was 11 years ago when we opened” the Avondale location. But “this is the new world we live in,” he adds.

And it’s not stopping him and Cikowski; Lachowicz, Escobar, and Angel; or numerous other driven chefs and restaurateurs from continuing to try to solve the complicated math problem that is running a sustainable, profitable restaurant with quality food, ingredients, and wages in a post-pandemic economy. “I love to produce food that makes people’s eyes open wide, and their mouths are agape when they eat it, and it’s so enjoyed – [it’s] instant gratification,” Lachowicz says. “I’m really grateful that I have the ability to do what I do. The problem is, I still need $2.50 to [at least] buy a newspaper when I’m doing it.”

Despite the disappointing trajectory of their Glencoe shop, Cikowski and Kulp haven’t ruled out further expansion. “We are pretty committed to growth,” Cikowski says. But, for now, they’re taking the chance to absorb the lessons they can take from the closing of Glencoe, regroup, and focus on the Avondale Honey Butter Fried Chicken in addition to TriBecca’s Sandwich Shop, which they co-own with a former employee. “We’re not done.”