The Bagel Returns to the North Shore as Downtown Glenview Grows

As The Record North Shore reported this past spring, Marvin Barsky said, "I'm confident that the name, The Bagel, people will remember it," describing the deli he is about to reopen a few blocks from the Glenview Metra platform.

Barsky is talking about a restaurant that closed in 2018, after 31 years feeding North Shore families at Old Orchard. He is not talking about a new concept chasing a trend. He is talking about bringing back something specific enough that people who moved away from Skokie a decade ago still ask about it. That kind of return does not happen by market forces alone. In downtown Glenview, it is happening because the Village put real money behind it, and because the timing lines up with a wave of construction, ribbon cuttings and civic events that are reshaping what a Tuesday night or a Saturday morning downtown actually looks like this fall.

The Village Put Skin in the Game

Most restaurant booms get described as if they simply happened, a critical mass of good taste and good luck. Downtown Glenview's did not. Since 2023, the Village Board has signed economic development agreements with a specific list of operators, offering grants and forgivable loans to get empty storefronts and underused lots turned into working kitchens. Foxtail at Glen View House received a $1.4 million grant and a $1.5 million loan from the Village to rehabilitate the historic building at 1843 Glenview Road, the same structure where Glenview's charter was signed in 1899. Ovvio Italian Taverna converted a long-vacant gas station on a $550,000 forgivable loan.

That is not incidental support. It is a deliberate strategy, and it explains why so many openings are clustering into the same two-year stretch instead of trickling in over years. The Village's own revitalization page frames the goal plainly: bring more restaurants and retail into a downtown that residents said, through a lengthy community feedback process called Glenview Connect, they wanted to see filled in.

What's Actually Open Right Now

If you have not walked Waukegan Road or Glenview Road recently, here is where things stand as of this September.

Foxtail's opening in August closed out a build-out that took most of a year, and the restaurant kept the name and history of the old Glenview House on purpose, serving Mediterranean coastal food with grilled octopus and lobster dynamite on a menu that reads nothing like the building's 19th-century past. Spiro's Deli, a Glenview fixture since 1962, is trading its 30-year home on Waukegan Road for a new corner near Lehigh, extending its hours to 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. while keeping The Bomber and its Italian beef exactly as they were. The Village's most recent public timeline had Spiro's targeting a mid-August 2026 opening, though as of this writing the move has not been publicly confirmed as complete.

Why The Bagel Is the Bigger Story

Every other name on that list is an addition. The Bagel is a return, and the geography makes it a strange kind of local irony. The Old Orchard location Barsky is trying to recreate sat inside a Skokie mall for 31 years before closing in 2018. Its new home sits inside Cerca, the 62-unit apartment building at 1850 Glenview Road that welcomed its first residents on June 19, 2026, a project developed by The Drake Group and now managed by RPM Living, with rents ranging from roughly $2,745 to $7,300 a month. Some of the very households now filling those units are the same demographic that used to drive to Old Orchard for lox and matzo ball soup.

Barsky did not plan the location so much as stumble into it. He was on his way to look at a different Glenview property when he passed an empty storefront with a for-lease sign. The lease he eventually signed puts the restaurant on the ground floor of a brand-new residential building, seating up to 150 people in roughly 5,000 square feet, with a staff of 35 to 40 and Rocio Carreras, whose father has worked as the deli's head chef for decades, running the operation as general manager.

The Part Nobody Advertises: Parking

None of this activity fits neatly into a downtown built for a much quieter era. Waukegan Road and Glenview Road were designed for pass-through traffic, not for people parking to sit down for ninety minutes at Foxtail's new back patio. The Village has been adding capacity to catch up. A 60-stall lot opened at the former Patio Shops site on River Drive. A shared agreement with Colonial Court now opens roughly 70 to 79 spaces during evenings and weekends, the exact hours when restaurant traffic peaks. Another 20 spaces were added at the commuter lot near Depot and Grove, with 60 more planned for an additional commuter lot as part of the same expansion.

Add it up and downtown Glenview picked up more than 150 new parking spaces in the span of a few months, which matters less as a statistic and more as a signal. The Village is not just recruiting restaurants. It is quietly rebuilding the infrastructure around them, one lot at a time, because the old supply was never going to hold this many destinations.

This Month, Specifically

Two September dates capture what downtown Glenview is becoming better than any single restaurant opening.

The Village's September 14 ribbon-cutting was scheduled for "Confluence: Life on Glenview's West Fork," an 85-by-15-foot mural on the west wall of the Jimmy John's building at 1746 Glenview Road. Designed by artist Anne Farley Gaines, it depicts the Glenview Road bridge and the North Branch of the Chicago River, and it came together through a collaboration involving the Glenview Art League, Friends of Downtown Glenview, the Glenview History Center, Greener Glenview, the Glenview Public Library and The Grove. It is only the village's second exterior mural, following one on the Public Works building that marked Glenview's 125th anniversary.

Twelve days later, on September 26, downtown hosts Blocktoberfest, the annual fall block party organized by Friends of Downtown Glenview that regularly draws more than 15,000 people for live music and food from the same restaurant corridor that has been under construction all year. Through October 24, the Glenview Farmers Market still runs Saturday mornings at Wagner Farm, where weekend wagon rides are already underway through October 31 and the pumpkin patch itself opens October 3.

None of these events required a restaurant to open on schedule. But this year, for the first time in a while, there is enough new to walk between that residents are treating a Saturday downtown less like an errand and more like a plan.

What This Adds Up To

The easy version of this story is that Glenview's downtown got a facelift and a few good restaurants showed up. The more accurate version is that the Village spent three years and a meaningful amount of public grant and loan money engineering a specific outcome, and this fall is when enough of those bets landed at once to notice. The Bagel's return is the clearest example. It is not a restaurant discovering demand in a growing suburb. It is a business the Village and a developer worked to place inside a brand-new building, timed to a community that in some cases used to drive somewhere else entirely to get the same sandwich.

If you have lived here through the years when Waukegan Road felt half-empty, this fall is the payoff of a plan you may not have known was a plan. If you are watching from a few blocks away and wondering whether now is finally the right time to be closer to it, the Geoff Brown Team has been tracking this corridor property by property since before the first shovel went into the ground at Cerca. Reach out for a free home valuation and a straight read on what downtown Glenview's momentum actually means for a property near it.