"We're excited to partner with One Off as they help shape the next generation of Highwood's dining scene."
That's Highwood City Manager Scott Coren, on the record, confirming that avec, the Mediterranean restaurant from Chicago's James Beard-winning One Off Hospitality group, will open its doors at 250 Waukegan Avenue on October 29. It reads like a clean announcement. It wasn't one. The city didn't get to make this news first. A flyer did.
The Flyer That Wasn't Supposed to Get Out
Back in September 2025, during the lead-up to Highwood Design Week's preview party, a flyer for the event surfaced with a detail nobody had confirmed yet: avec was coming to town. The rumor moved through the North Shore before One Off Hospitality issued a single word of official comment. Within days, the group confirmed it to NBC Chicago and named the address: a former boxing gym at 250 Waukegan Avenue, the same building the Warehouse Boxing Gym had just vacated for a new home in Highland Park.
That sequence matters more than it looks. Design Week is a four-day showcase of interior designers, art installations and local makers, run by the Highwood Chamber of Commerce. It isn't a restaurant trade show. But because avec's arrival broke through a Design Week flyer rather than a press release, the event accidentally became something else for residents paying attention: the earliest, most reliable place to find out what's actually changing on Waukegan Avenue before it's official. This year's Design Week runs September 15 through 18, under the theme "Design Is Everywhere," and it lands exactly six weeks before avec opens. If last year's edition is any indication, this week is worth watching for more than paint swatches and gallery pop-ups.
What Happened Between the Rumor and the Reservation
The year between the flyer and the front door tells you how a single restaurant announcement turned into a real estate strategy.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| September 2025 | Flyer leaks avec's arrival; One Off Hospitality confirms the address to NBC Chicago |
| November 2025 | Construction begins on the 5,000-square-foot former boxing gym |
| April 2026 | One Off Hospitality finalizes a deal with Highwood's City Council to buy the adjacent building |
| September 2026 | Official release confirms an October 29 opening date; reservations open October 1 |
| Spring 2027 | The purchased building next door opens as a dedicated private event space |
The original plan, as described when avec was first announced, called for a single restaurant seating around 115 people. The version actually opening this fall is a different footprint entirely: a 95-seat main dining room, a 48-seat barroom, and a separate private event space next door built to hold up to 75 people standing, with its own bar and a facade designed with retractable walls for an indoor-outdoor setup. That's not a restaurant that grew its menu. That's a restaurant that grew its real estate holdings before it served its first plate.
Buying the Building Next Door Before Opening Night Says Something
One Off Hospitality didn't lease extra square footage once demand justified it. The group closed on the building next to avec in April, roughly six months before opening day, while construction on the original space was still underway. Highwood's April 21 City Council meeting is where that deal actually got finalized, which means the expansion was locked in before a single customer had eaten a bite of the food.
That's a different growth model than most of what's opened in downtown Highwood over the past decade. Del Rio, the family-owned northern Italian restaurant that's been serving Waukegan Avenue for decades, and Miramar, the French bistro that's become a fixture of the same stretch, both grew by staying exactly the size they were designed to be. Neither expanded into the storefront next door. Their longevity came from consistency, not acquisition.
Avec is doing something closer to what a hospitality company with 12 James Beard Foundation Awards of Excellence and existing locations in the West Loop and River North would do: treat a suburban debut as the first phase of a multi-building footprint, not a single opening night. For residents, that means the stretch of Waukegan Avenue around 250 will look different by the spring of 2027 than it does this October, with two connected buildings functioning as one hospitality operation instead of one restaurant with a parking lot next door.
A Different Kind of New in the Same Small Town
Seven months after that flyer leaked, a much smaller opening happened elsewhere in town. Pelago Cafe opened in April 2026, founded by cousins Ruthie Amidei and Mada Ugolini-Hitchmough, both Highwood residents. Their story isn't about acquisition. Hitchmough's father worked as a baker in Italy's Emilia-Romagna region before immigrating to the United States, and Amidei studied culinary arts in Tuscany before the two decided to open a café built around that family history, in the town where they both still live.
Pelago and avec are opening in the same calendar year in the same small town, and they represent two entirely different theories of what a new restaurant in Highwood should be. One is a single storefront run by people who grew up eating the food they now serve. The other is a national hospitality brand's first suburban location, expanding its physical footprint before it has even proven the concept locally. Both are valid. Neither cancels the other out. But conflating them into a single "Highwood's restaurant scene is booming" narrative misses the more useful fact: this town is currently host to both a family opening its first location and an established restaurant group building its second building at the same time. That's two different kinds of growth happening at once, and it's worth knowing which one you're walking into before you decide what a night out here is going to feel like a year from now.
What This Week Actually Means This Time
Design Week's schedule runs through the Chamber of Commerce's own event listings, and this year's four days include the kind of design showcases and local maker events the week has always featured. But given what happened last September, it's reasonable for residents to treat this week as more than a design showcase. If a Chamber of Commerce event flyer tipped off one of the biggest restaurant stories the North Shore suburbs have seen in years, there's no reason to assume this year's edition won't carry a preview of its own, whether that's a look inside avec's dining room before its October 29 debut or something else entirely that hasn't surfaced yet.
For now, what's confirmed is straightforward. Avec starts taking reservations online on October 1, ahead of its October 29 opening. Pelago Cafe is already open and serving the neighborhood it was built for. Del Rio and Miramar keep doing what they've done for years. And a building next door to avec, quietly purchased back in April, sits waiting for its own debut sometime in the spring of 2027. Whatever else Design Week reveals this week, that timeline alone tells you Highwood's Waukegan Avenue isn't finished changing. It's just getting started on its second phase.
If you're watching Highwood's changes for reasons beyond dinner reservations, whether that's a home you've had your eye on nearby or a sense of where the neighborhood is heading next, Sondra Douglass has spent years tracking exactly this kind of local detail across the North Shore. Reach out to talk through what's happening in Highwood and what it might mean for your own plans.
