ENGLEWOOD — Deon Lucas needed a place to eat.
As the architect and leader of E.G. Woode, a firm of entrepreneurs aiming to revitalize Englewood, Lucas often has lunch meetings with business owners and developers.
When they ask where to meet for a meal, Lucas comes up short, he said. Englewood doesn’t have any places he can suggest.
“Let’s not go to Englewood to talk about Englewood,” Lucas said. “What sense does that make?
In a city of Michelin-star chefs and award-winning eateries serving nearly every type of cuisine, Englewood stands out for what it doesn’t have: a full-service, sit-down restaurant.
Sikia, the student-run restaurant at Washburne Culinary and Hospitality Institute — once the only white-tablecloth restaurant in Englewood — has been closed since 2020 while school leaders plan its relaunch.
The nearest open sit-down restaurant is West Englewood’s Fifty-One 50 Fusion, 7354 S. Ashland Ave. Other places with seating areas, like John’s Drive-In and Georgia’s Food Depot, have either done away with dine-in service due to the pandemic or closed altogether in recent years.
“Everyone works here or frequents here, but when it’s time to eat, dine or relax, we have to leave,” Lucas said. “Folks feel neglected.”
Restaurants are the lifeblood of a community, serving as gathering spots as much as revenue generators.
Englewood once boasted a thriving commercial district with independent restaurants and shops. But decades of discriminatory practices and disinvestment have resulted in swaths of vacant lots, many owned by the city, and a retail leakage of about $194 million a year.
“We believe in the magic, but sometimes it’s a hard sell to get people to shop in Englewood,” said Asiaha Butler of the Resident Association of Greater Englewood.
Local entrepreneurs face financial hurdles, city processing delays, technical difficulties and other obstacles as they seek to develop neighborhood necessities. But they remain resilient — and things are changing, albeit slowly. Where some neighbors and visitors to Englewood see blight and loss, Lucas and other local leaders and entrepreneurs see an opportunity to rebuild, one table at a time.
“I was told by numerous people I shouldn’t open in the neighborhood because there was a lack of resources,” said restaurateur Darryl Fuery, who opened the casual brats-and-doughnuts spot Haute Brats in August. “But as residents of Englewood, if we don’t provide the quality of food or places that people want to support, we can’t expect other people to come into our areas and build it up.”
‘Black Businesses Were The Benchmark’
In the mid-20th century, the 63rd and Halsted shopping district in the heart of Englewood rivaled the Loop, generating more than a billion dollars a year in today’s currency, according to the Tribune.
The predominantly white community had mega department stores like Sears and Wieboldt’s. Residents claimed they could find everything they wanted in the neighborhood, according to the Tribune.
By 1970, as Black families escaped the unendurable conditions of the South and settled North, and others left crowded neighborhoods in Chicago, Englewood had become a predominantly Black community, according to the Encyclopedia of Chicago.
White flight stripped the community of its investments and ushered in discriminatory housing practices such as redlining and land sale contracts — but it also spurred Englewood residents to start businesses, said Jakobi Williams, an Indiana University Bloomington history professor and Englewood native.
“When white flight happens, they usually take the resources with them, and the tax base erodes because of the ways institutional racism works. But because of that, the entrepreneurship of many of our community members began to build up,” said Williams, chair of IU Bloomington’s Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies.
Fuery, who moved to Englewood in 1974, remembers it as “the place to be” in the late 1970s, he said.
“Englewood was amazing,” Fuery said. “Restaurants and businesses were in abundance because people gravitated to the area. There were so many people coming to Englewood.”
Laundromats, churches, convenience stores and restaurants owned by Greater Englewood residents became “the backbones of much of the community’s progress” during this time, Williams said.
“Those Black businesses were the benchmarks,” Williams said.
Yet even with the rise in entrepreneurship during this decade, the loss of stockyard and railroad jobs — once the community’s driving economic force — along with deep-rooted racist housing policies that had cheated Black residents of their homes were already accelerating Englewood’s decline.
Englewood in 1971 was “a community of contrasts, a community which simultaneously is facing prosperity and blight, whose residents are diffused between middle class and hard-core poverty,” according to the Tribune.
When Williams was growing up in the ’80s, the influx of crack cocaine and drug addiction ravaged Englewood and other poverty-stricken communities, and politicians used it to vilify Black people.
“Englewood began to see no jobs, no food, disinvestment in the community, dissipation of school programs and an influx of crack cocaine, which was labeled the drug of the poor and underserved,” Williams said.
From the mid-’90s into the 21st century, chains like McDonald’s replaced the dwindling mom-and-pop restaurants and businesses, Williams said. Liquor stores, “another form of addiction perpetuated in the community,” began to pop up, he said.
“The community’s aspirations began to go away,” Williams said. “Once the economic prosperity and the jobs and opportunities are gone, you get a lack of investment from the city.”
Barriers To Entry
Opening a restaurant or other business anywhere in the city is hard enough, with “cumbersome, difficult and costly processes that act as a barrier for entry,” said Elliot Richardson, co-founder and president of the Small Business Advocacy Council, a nonprofit that advocates for policies that help small businesses thrive.
“It’s incredibly difficult for an entrepreneur that does not have a significant amount of money and time to navigate the hurdles it takes to open a business in Chicago right now,” Richardson said.
Compounding the issue for entrepreneurs in Englewood: The community is rife with vacant city-owned lots and buildings that are unavailable or unusable.
“There’s no space,” said Felicia Slaton-Young, executive director and founder of the Greater Englewood Chamber of Commerce.
Greater Englewood is among the communities with the most city-owned vacant lots along commercial corridors — about 2,074 lots, according to city data. Only about 413 of those lots are up for sale, according to the city’s ChiBlockBuilder program, which allows neighbors to buy and redevelop the land.
By contrast, the number of city-owned vacant lots in nearby communities like Hyde Park is in the single digits.
Many of the storefronts still standing along Greater Englewood’s commercial corridors have been vacant or neglected for years, Slaton-Young said. Many of those dilapidated buildings are owned by landlords who keep their storefronts empty to collect a tax break, Slaton-Young said.
“When we leave our corridors unrevitalized, it prevents restaurants, retailers or service providers from getting in these spaces and doing business,” Slaton-Young said. “The financial impact of continuing to keep these spaces vacant is huge for communities like Englewood.”
The Small Business Advocacy Council and South and West side chambers of commerce have for years called for a limit on the tax breaks landlords can get for vacant commercial storefronts. The Assessor’s Office provides tax relief for up to two years for property owners who have “made good faith” to lease their property.
In spring 2023, the Assessor’s Office, in collaboration with the Small Business Advocacy Council, released an updated policy that limits owners to one tax reduction until their property is rented.
The policy change will hopefully encourage owners to lease the space to entrepreneurs, reducing vacancies and spurring economic growth, Richardson said.
“Once we reach a point where we can revitalize and rehab these vacant spaces to get business and commerce happening, we can hold so much more from a fiscal standpoint while attracting big names and big-box businesses who also want to be in this community,” Slaton-Young said.
Brats, Doughnuts And Debt
Fuery of Haute Brats, 6239 S. Ashland Ave., is among those who have decided to make a go of it in Englewood after years of watching restaurants in the neighborhood leave or close.
Fuery’s philosophy: “If we didn’t see it, maybe we should build it.”
But opening his takeout spot has been anything but straightforward.
“Just to get a sign outside is $300 a year. There are a lot of fees that would discourage the average person,” Fuery said.
Fuery initially wanted to open in the summer when people are typically searching for a good hot dog spot, but liens on the previous property owner delayed the city’s business license approval process, Fuery said.
When Haute Brats opened in the fall, Fuery had to default to catering to stay afloat, he said.
He operates as a “one-man show” — buying the ingredients, prepping orders, marketing the business and handling finances. It’s all “very tiresome,” he said.
Fuery had also planned to create a culinary training program, Teaching N Training L3C, as part of Haute Brats, but programs created during the pandemic that would have helped him launch it have dried up, he said.
Fuery hopes to expand his restaurant one day to offer sit-down dining. When he does, Haute Brats will offer “fine dining on a low-grade budget” with “fancy pasta, vegan dishes and more at a low price,” he said.
“One of our accomplishments was that we went forward even with our issues and problems. Most people would have probably closed down and said it wasn’t worth it,” Fuery said.
‘Development From The Ground Up’
About a mile from Haute Brats, the former Leon’s Bar-B-Q, 1158 W. 59th St., has sat empty for decades.
Another Englewood resident, Asiaha Butler, is working to change that.
Butler, founder of Resident Association of Greater Englewood, is spearheading the Re-Up 1158 Project to revive the old Leon’s and bring at least one new restaurant to the building.
Butler’s R.A.G.E. Economic Upliftment Program received the building from the Cook County Land Bank in February 2023, nearly two years after putting a bid on the property.
Three restaurateurs initially submitted letters of interest for the space, but their plans changed as the project faced “unpreventable delays,” Butler said. The Re-Up team is now looking for at least one “pioneer and innovator who understands the magic that lives in this community” to open a sit-down restaurant in the 59th Street building, Butler said.
Meanwhile, Butler has applied for public funding opportunities for the project, but has so far been “passed up,” she said.
“These are the types of projects that public dollars should be lined up at the door to support,” Butler said. “It’s difficult when I get [declined] on a public plan for something people should want to support, but that’s sometimes the work you have to face when you’re doing development from the ground up.”
‘The Right To Experience Dining’
The most ambitious restaurant project repurposing vacant space in Englewood is Lucas’ E.G. Woode Food Hub, 1022 W. 63rd St.
The $7.1 million project will transform the deteriorated building into two new restaurants, Pass the Peas and Ellie’s Urban Grill; a pop-up kitchen for aspiring restaurateurs; and three small offices.
Lucas asked alderpeople in October to approve an ordinance awarding up to $5 million in tax-increment financing for a gut rehab of the dilapidated 63rd Street building. The project has about $2 million in lender financing and $90,000 in equity, according to the Department of Planning and Development.
Alds. David Moore (17th) and Raymond Lopez (15th) moved to defer and publish the ordinance, delaying a vote by the full Council. Moore said at the time he was “pushing” for TIF dollars to go toward a new field house at Ogden Park, 6500 S. Racine.
More than three months later, the Council has yet to vote on the ordinance.
Still, Lucas remains optimistic about the project’s future, and he disagrees with the theory he often hears that full-service, upscale restaurants can’t survive until the community has more residents with disposable income.
Neighborhoods like North Lawndale, where restaurants like Soul Food Lounge continue to expand, prove that’s not the case, he said.
“[Moore] shouldn’t have to sacrifice what he wants to get done, but, vice versa, we shouldn’t have to sacrifice people’s lifestyles, quality of life and the right to experience dining in their community,” Lucas said. “We shouldn’t have to choose between options.”
Moore defended his decision with Block Club this week, saying Lopez and Ald. Stephanie Coleman (16th) agreed with him because they weren’t consulted about the TIF money beforehand. Englewood’s TIF district taps into all five wards that include the neighborhood.
Food and restaurants are important, but “to say $7.1 million and Ogden gets nothing becomes a problem,” Moore told Block Club. Ogden Park is a “huge priority for Englewood” and “critical because it’s for our youth,” Moore said.
The new commissioner of the city’s Department of Planning and Development needs to sit down with local officials to discuss how TIF finances are distributed per project, Moore said.
“If one project gets $7 million and another project gets nothing, who’s making that determination and why?” Moore said. “We have to look at projects collectively.”
But at the end of the day, Englewood “deserves the best of both worlds,” Moore said.
“They’re forcing us to choose between eating and taking medicine. We can do both. We have to get out of that.”
A ‘Refreshed’ Sikia To Reopen In Fall
People claim that the “Black dollar doesn’t circulate or last long in our communities,” said Williams, the IU Bloomington history professor. But if neighbors have to leave their communities to enjoy basic necessities, “how do we expect that dollar to circulate?”
Sit-down restaurants are one solution that keeps the dollars in the neighborhood, he said.
In a few months, Englewood’s only sit-down restaurant should again be serving neighbors — and visitors.
Sikia has been closed since the onset of the pandemic, but leaders at Kennedy-King College are refreshing the restaurant with about $500,000 from a historic $5 million grant given to the college by philanthropist MacKenzie Scott.
Sikia is expected to reopen in the fall fully remodeled, serving an upscale but affordable menu for lunch three days a week and dinner twice a week, leaders at Kennedy-King said.
Community leaders said they hope Sikia’s reopening will add momentum to their efforts to build a thriving Englewood, rich with the amenities other communities may take for granted.
“Sikia used to be the place to go when I had lunch meetings, but it would be great to see several of those cases exist in the community,” Butler said.
“It feels good to say we’re going to create something that we know is truly needed and residents will appreciate, because we do want to have a place where we can dine — be it breakfast, lunch or dinner.”
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