What Does It Take for a Restaurant to Come Back After a Fire?

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It was one of the most anticipated restaurants of the year. Gingie was the standalone debut of Brian Lockwood, who had led some of the most acclaimed kitchens in the country and served as a consulting chef for the breakout Chicago-set show The Bear. The luxurious restaurant, the Boka Restaurant Group’s replacement of its GT Prime at 707 N. Wells St., had been months in the making. 

It opened on March 26.

Three days later, a fire broke out in the open kitchen. No one was hurt, but the restaurant had to close. It had served customers for less than a week.

Fires are an inescapable hazard of restaurants. Fire, after all, is our primary source of the heat that transforms pink meat into succulent chicken, tenderizes vegetables, boils water for noodles, caramelizes sugars, and turns dough into bread. Our ancestors decided hundreds of thousands of years ago that the physiological and gustatory benefits of cooked food outweighed the peril of elemental flame, but the danger has always been there, ready to roar into a destructive inferno. Modern safety features and containment methods have mitigated much of the risk that comes from harnessing fire in small spaces that contain ignitable fats and explosive gas lines, but accidents are still bound to occasionally rage out of control. 

They don’t even have to start in the kitchen. Dear Margaret had occupied the eccentrically shaped ground floor of a nearly 150-year-old building at 2965 N. Lincoln Ave. for five years when a seldom used electrical outlet behind the bar sparked late in the evening on a Monday in October, 2025. The restaurant was closed; no one was there. The fire didn’t burn long, but its smoke and heat ruined the room. 

“It essentially turned into like a hot smoker and it superheated the entire inside of the dining room, popped all the drywall screws, so it was a complete loss in there,” says the restaurant’s owner, Lacey Irby. “You have no idea how pervasive smoke can be until you see it on literally every surface.” 

Almost a year later, Dear Margaret has yet to reopen. The restaurant’s landlord decided to cut losses and sell the building to be torn down and redeveloped. (As of this writing, it is still standing.) 

“We have been looking for real estate ever since,” says Irby, while also hosting occasional intimate dinners in various locations and collaborating with other restaurants on specials. She wants to reopen in Lakeview, but the needs of the restaurant are specific and difficult to match, since Dear Margaret is an independent restaurant with limited capital but requires a large kitchen in which to make almost everything they serve from scratch. 

“It’s been tricky to find a space that makes sense for us,” says Irby. But she remains optimistic and determined – she opened Dear Margaret during the pandemic, in 2020 – even viewing the forced relocation as “a blessing in disguise.” The restaurant had received plenty of attention, so she was already considering looking for a larger space, plus the age of the building meant there were “a lot of maintenance needs that had not been looked at,” she says, with new problems emerging almost every month.  

Even if Dear Margaret had been able to stay in its original location, it might not have reopened by now: The estimate to repair it was around seven months, and as anyone who has observed restaurant openings or had construction work done in recent years knows, estimates are always a few weeks if not months short.

The team behind Irene’s Finer Diner in North Center can attest to this. When a fire closed their breakfast spot less than two years after it opened, the initial timeline to reopen was three to five months. 

“Obviously that didn’t happen,” says chef and co-owner Noah Zamler with a wry chuckle. Irene’s reopened in May of this year, nearly two years after a small fire broke out after hours in the kitchen. While the flames didn’t do that much damage, putting them out did. The cause is still undetermined.

Zamler had already purchased slots at farmers markets to sell jam, hot sauce, and bread under the Irene’s brand. But, with the restaurant kitchen out of commission, he had to make everything in his apartment. He had limited space there, particularly for bread. Bagels were easier to scale in the small kitchen, not requiring refrigeration of the dough. They proved popular, so Zamler kept making more each week. Eventually, he hit his capacity, and the diner was still not ready to reopen, so he and his partners decided to open a standalone bagel shop in the meantime. Irene’s Bagels + Coffee opened at 1942 W. Montrose Ave. in December of last year.

 “Necessity breeds innovation,” Zamler says. 

While insurance covered some lost wages from the diner, the money from bagels and sporadic pop-ups carried Zamler and his co-owners through the rest of the reconstruction period. (Insurance fully covered the cost of the rebuild.)

Irby and Dear Margaret’s chef Ryan Brousseau are also being kept “afloat” by insurance in the wake of their fire. But that money doesn’t extend to their staff. Dear Margaret covered two staff paychecks after the fire, the second with the help of a GoFundMe set up by a regular customer, “but after that, I did have to cut the team loose,” Irby says. “It was perhaps the worst day of my life.” 

Since Gingie is part of a restaurant group, a number of the staff were able to move to a different concept within the group after the fire, according to co-founder Rob Katz, particularly because Boka had recently opened two other new places in Chicago, Midōsuji and The Ives.

Re-staffing a restaurant after a fire can be difficult. Irene’s insurance covered a year’s worth of wages for staff, but reopening took almost two years, so employees went on to other jobs. (A handful, including Zamler’s wife, returned for the reopening.) Hiring and training is a six-week process, so Zamler and his co-owners started it based on the timeline given them by their contractors in the hope that they could reopen as soon as construction finished. But delays kept emerging, and the newly hired employees could only wait so long before they needed to find a job somewhere else to make money. 

“That was the most difficult part with reopening,” Zamler says.

Rebuilding and wages are obviously two of the biggest costs associated with a closure due to a fire, but there are others, too. In the immediate aftermath, bills from food suppliers and vendors still come through. Since Irby was vacating her space, she had to hire a dumpster to throw things out and movers to transport things she could keep to storage, which has its own cost. There’s the accountant to pay, the website hosting fee, and number of other minor expenses even as your business isn’t operational. 

“It’s not like it goes down to zero,” Irby says. 

But she refuses to give up on Dear Margaret. “We are nothing if not agile and nimble and creative, and I know that we’ll figure out something else here in the interim,” she says.

“We’re just so thankful that people still care about Dear Margaret. I promise we’re finding a way back as soon as we can.”

Gingie found a way back, quicker than most. The damage was contained to the kitchen, and a successful restaurant group can more easily absorb losses and invest money to expedite reopening. (DineAmic Hospitality was able to reopen its Prime & Provisions steakhouse this year seven months after a fire.) Not that it’s a surefire thing: In 2017, a fire closed Boka’s Balena, and it never returned. 

Five months after closing, Gingie reopened, on August 29. The open hearth where the fire had broken out was gone, the kitchen and menu slightly rejiggered. A mural by Emily Parkinson that wraps the main dining room with storybook illustrations of Chicago landmarks, cutesy animals, and easter eggs referencing local restaurants had also been updated. It now contained a phoenix.