Lake Forest's Restaurant Scene Just Split Into Three Different Blocks

"It feels familiar, yet unmistakably new."

That's how the general manager at Deer Path Inn described The Brasserie, the restaurant that took over the space known for nearly a century as The English Room. The line works for more than just one dining room. Walk downtown Lake Forest right now and you'll find the same tension everywhere: old addresses holding onto new tenants, and new tenants scattered across three parts of town that used to feel like one.

If you've eaten at Market Square in the last few years and assumed that's the whole story, you're missing two other pockets of the same reshuffle happening a few blocks away. Lake Forest's dinner options didn't multiply in one place. They split into three, and each one draws a different crowd for a different reason.

Market Square Keeps Its Address, Changes Its Kitchens

Market Square has been the anchor of downtown since 1916, when architect Howard Van Doren Shaw designed it as one of the first planned shopping centers in the country, complete with dedicated automobile parking decades before that was standard practice. The buildings haven't moved. What sits inside them has.

The clearest example is Le Colonial, the French-Vietnamese restaurant that opened in 2022 inside a two-story building constructed in 1901 as the town's fire and police station. It was the concept's first move outside a downtown Chicago address, and co-owner Rick Wahlstedt was direct about why Lake Forest made sense: a lot of his Gold Coast regulars, he said, were "getting a restaurant a little closer to home." The renovated space now holds a palm-filled dining room, a second-floor event space, and a garden bar facing the Square's green.

A few doors down, Oaken Bistro + Bar has settled into the same cluster with an all-day American menu and a patio built around a fire pit, close enough to Market Square that it reads as part of the same block rather than a separate stop.

The same pattern showed up again this spring at Deer Path Inn, the downtown hotel that had served meals out of The English Room for 97 years. In March 2026, the inn replaced that dining room with The Brasserie, a brighter space with brass accents and marble-topped tables built, in the hotel's words, "around the art of conversation." The address didn't change. The name over the door and everything inside it did.

None of this touches the tenants who were already there before any of it opened. Left Bank has been serving Chicago-style hot dogs from the same hole-in-the-wall spot since 1963. Kiddles Sports has outfitted Lake Forest kids since 1968. Neither business is competing for a dinner reservation, and that's exactly the point: the restaurant turnover inside Market Square happens around a set of retail anchors old enough to have outlasted the shopping malls that were supposed to make Market Square obsolete in the first place.

One Block North, a Restaurant That Skipped the Landmark Building

Follia didn't need a historic shell to make its case. Chef Bruno Abate opened the Italian restaurant at 950 N. Western Avenue in June 2025, in an ordinary storefront rather than a converted firehouse or a century-old inn. It's his third restaurant under the Follia name, after the original in Chicago's Fulton Market and Tocco in Winnetka, and he wasn't shy about why he added a third: "I kind of need a challenge in my life," he said of the decision, crediting Lake Forest friends who kept pushing him to open one closer to them.

The menu leans on handmade pasta and sauces built daily, and the restaurant imported details down to the glassware, sourced from Murano near Venice. It's a different bet than Le Colonial's: no landmark address, no decades of institutional weight to lean on, just a storefront a block off the Square that's building its own reputation from scratch.

That distinction matters if you're trying to picture the two restaurants side by side. One occupies a building the town has protected for over a century. The other is proving a concept can work on Western Avenue without any of that history attached to the walls.

The Citadel Theatre Corridor Finally Got Its Own Kitchen

The third shift happened somewhere most downtown-focused write-ups skip entirely: the stretch of Waukegan Road near Citadel Theatre and Lake Forest Hospital. For years, a night at Citadel meant one real choice for food nearby, aside from the standing pizza option at Piero's. Anyone wanting a full sit-down meal before curtain had a familiar problem: they needed to "head east to downtown Lake Forest in order to find a true dining experience."

That gap closed with Little Tails Sports Bar & Grill, which opened directly across from the theater at 840 S. Waukegan Road, in the strip center anchored by Starbucks. The menu runs heavier than the name suggests, and the space seats theatergoers in a dining room with large windows rather than tucking them into an overflow bar area. It's a small addition on paper, but it changes the calculus for anyone who used to build a Citadel night around a drive back into the Square first.

The Three Blocks, Side by Side

Three different addresses, three different reasons to end up there, and until recently, only one of them had more than a single restaurant worth planning a night around.

What Hasn't Moved

It's worth separating the restaurants from everything else downtown, because the retail side of Market Square tells a different story. The Lake Forest Shop has sold women's clothing from the same Square storefront since 1922. Kiddles Sports has held its spot since 1968. Both businesses survived the 1956 opening of Old Orchard Mall, which was built specifically to pull shoppers away from exactly this kind of small-town square, and both are still there while the restaurant tenants around them keep turning over. If you're trying to figure out what's permanent downtown and what's just the current occupant, the shops are the better bet.

Why the Split Is Worth Knowing

None of this changes where Market Square's fountain sits or which train platform faces which storefront. What it changes is which corner of downtown actually has the option you're picturing. If your mental map of Lake Forest dining still ends at the Square, you're skipping Follia's pasta a block north and missing the fact that a night at Citadel no longer requires a drive back downtown first. Two of the three shifts happened within the past eighteen months, at Deer Path Inn this spring and at Follia in the summer of 2025. The third, Le Colonial's arrival inside the old firehouse, is older news by now, but it set the pattern the other two are still following: keep the address, change what's cooking.

That kind of granular, block-by-block read on a place is exactly the sort of local detail that's easy to miss from a listing photo or a drive-through impression. If you're curious how these shifts in a neighborhood's daily rhythm tend to line up with what's happening in the local housing market, the team at Chicagoland Real Estate Advisors tracks both sides of that closely. Reach out anytime you want a local read that goes beyond the map.