Walk down Wilmette Avenue on a Saturday this September and you can do something that wasn't possible a year ago twice over. Ten minutes east, inside a Spanish Revival arcade built in the 1920s, you can window-shop an $8,000 handbag at a boutique that didn't exist in Illinois outside of Oak Street until last month. Ten minutes back toward the Metra tracks, you can sit down for a cocktail at a bar that, legally speaking, could not have opened in this village at any point before this year.
Both of those firsts landed in Wilmette in the same stretch of 2026. Only one of them required two separate meetings of Wilmette's Village Board and a new license class.
The Corner That Sold Steaks for More Than Two Decades
Start with the smaller story, because it's the one with a name attached and a family behind it. As The Record North Shore reported, Al's Meat Market opened in Winnetka in the 1960s under Al Spera, then moved to 1165 Wilmette Ave. in 2001 under his son Joe, who ran it for more than two decades before retiring and closing the shop in January 2026. That closure quietly ended one of the North Shore's longer-running independent butcher runs. It also left Wilmette with a single independent butcher, Zier's Prime Meats and Poultry, after NorShore Meats and Deli closed back in 2022.
Into that exact storefront came The Mette, a cocktail bar and lounge from Wilmette resident Jason Sander. Its own website describes it plainly as the village's first and only bar. Sander told The Record North Shore his team planned to invest between $350,000 and $550,000 into the buildout, and by the time OpenTable reviews started rolling in this August, the space had a new life: pre-dinner cocktails, a curated food menu, a look the owners call vintage-inspired.
The License Class Behind The Mette's Opening
Wilmette's liquor code, before this year, had no classification that allowed a business to generate the majority of its sales from alcohol rather than food. Every existing license assumed a restaurant that happened to serve drinks, not a bar that happened to serve a light menu.
So the Village Board spent parts of two separate sessions, one in December 2025 and another in February 2026, working out a new license class specifically to make this business legal. Trustees debated a fee, eventually landing on $6,000, the highest of any liquor license in the village. They stipulated food had to be prepared on-site and available at all times, a condition meant to keep the new class from turning into a loophole for any bar in town. They discussed how it might affect neighboring restaurants, and Sander told the committee his goal was to complement dinner elsewhere, not compete with it.
The Mette's opening followed a different path from a typical retail opening: the village created a license class for a bar serving a light menu.
Meanwhile, at Plaza del Lago, a Very Different Kind of First
While trustees were writing liquor code, a much bigger transformation was happening at Plaza del Lago, the century-old outdoor shopping center on Sheridan Road. WS Development bought the property in June 2022 and has been re-tenanting it ever since. Seven storefronts opened there in 2025, including Space 519, James Perse, Jenni Kayne, Rag & Bone, LoveShackFancy, Veronica Beard, and Hill House Home.
This summer brought the marquee names. Hermès opened an 8,000-square-foot, two-story boutique on August 8, its second Illinois location after the one on East Oak Street and its first outside Chicago proper. Peter Millar opened its storefront. Oscar de la Renta soft-opened in early August as the fashion house's first Midwest location, with a second-floor bridal salon still to come. And The Henry, a restaurant from Fox Restaurant Concepts, got its final village inspection approval and opened as the brand's first Midwest outpost, with both an indoor dining room and a coffee bar out front.
WS Development now counts 21 signed leases at the center. That's a striking number for a property that's only a few acres of storefronts.
What the Village's Own Numbers Show
The retail wave already shows up in Wilmette's finances. Finance Director Melinda Molloy told the Village Board in July that Plaza del Lago generated $254,000 in combined sales tax revenue over the six months from October 2025 through March 2026, compared with the roughly $102,000 the village had typically collected from the center over a similar span. That's a 149 percent increase, and it doesn't even include sales from The Henry or Hermès yet, because Illinois has a lag in how it remits sales tax to municipalities. The number the village is currently counting is the floor, not the ceiling.
WS Development also owns Edens Plaza, where Wayfair opened its first brick-and-mortar store in May 2024 and has been one of the village's top sales tax generators since. Both shopping centers are owned by WS Development, and each has added new retail tenants.
Why None of This Sat Vacant
None of this happened into empty storefronts sitting around for months. The village's own economic development update from last fall put it bluntly: downtown Wilmette has very few vacancies overall, and when a business leaves the Village Center, that space typically gets leased again within one to two months. Al's Meat Market closed in January, and The Mette opened in the same year. Small Cheval, a spinoff of Chicago's Au Cheval, moved into the old Depot Nuevo space at 1139 Wilmette Ave., while Egg Harbor Cafe opened across from the Wilmette Metra station inside the new Optima Verdana building, filling ground-floor retail there.
A village with a six percent commercial vacancy rate doesn't have a "revitalization" story so much as a turnover story. Wilmette wasn't sitting empty and waiting to be discovered. It was already full, and the full storefronts just changed hands faster than usual this year.
What This Actually Means for a Saturday
If you live here, the practical version of all this is simple. There are now two distinct downtowns worth walking, roughly ten minutes apart on foot, both an easy stroll from the Metra stop. One is the arcade at Plaza del Lago, where Convito Café & Market, Jewel-Osco, CVS, and Starbucks still anchor the everyday errands while Hermès and Oscar de la Renta pull in a different kind of visitor entirely. The other is the village center along Wilmette and Central Avenues, where a 60-year butcher shop just became the village's only bar, and where Small Cheval and Egg Harbor Cafe have quietly filled in the daytime and lunch crowd around it.
Neither of these changes required you to drive to the city. Both happened on streets Wilmette residents already walk every week. Together, they mark a notable change in Wilmette’s commercial core.
If you're watching how Wilmette's commercial core keeps reshaping itself and wondering what it means for a specific block or a specific home, that's exactly the kind of on-the-ground read Audra Casey tracks month to month across the North Shore. Reach out for the latest Wilmette market report and early access to listings before they hit the open market.
This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.
