A little more than a year after Amano Vivere Cafe’s closing left the commercial space at Orland Park’s Ninety 7 Fifty on the Park apartment development conspicuously empty, a new restaurant is open for business.
Cafe au Parc, a coffee shop and wine bar, opened last week — less than three months after owners Kevin Gawlinski and Nathalie Baranyk made the decision to go into the restaurant business over Bloody Marys at brunch on a rainy Sunday morning.
Baranyk, 36, said one of the cafe’s specialties is charcuterie platters featuring imported European meats and cheeses she was introduced to during a nine-year stint working in Italy.
“We wanted to bring something to Orland Park that’s not here right now, things you might see downtown but that we might be able to introduce to people in the suburbs,” she said, such as “liquid gold” buffalo mozzarella from Naples.
The restaurant also offers imported wines, local craft beers, sandwiches, salads and pizzas, along with pastries and Lavazza and Intelligentsia coffees in the morning and gluten-free versions of each dish.
If the ingredients are imported, the restaurant itself is about as local as a business can get. Gawlinski and Baranyk share an apartment a few floors above the restaurant. It’s how Gawlinski, 45, said he got the idea for the restaurant, passing by the windows in the vacant storefront each day.
“I would walk by and think, ‘Something ought to be there,’ ” he said. “I didn’t think it would be tough to get people in as long as what we were selling was outstanding.”
Despite the hectic traffic on nearby LaGrange Road, Gawlinski and Baranyk said the restaurant’s first few days have been busy.
“It’s horrible, but for all the people that live in the building, they don’t even have to get in their cars,” Baranyk said.
They also said they hope a University of Chicago Medicine facility expected to be built nearby will bring patients, families and employees who might want to stop in for a meal.
Gawlinski said they’re considering in-building delivery, along with live music and wine-tasting events, but for now are taking it one step at a time.
He still has a full-time job as an engineer in the petrochemical field, and as they’re still in the process of hiring a full staff, they say they’re doing much of the restaurant work — from setup to cooking — themselves.
“We’re having fun working really hard,” Baranyk said.
Ninety 7 Fifty on the Park is the first development in the village’s Main Street Triangle area, the 27-acre wedge between LaGrange Road, 143rd Street and Southwest Highway.
The apartment complex developer said last summer the 295 units filled much more quickly than expected. The only area where interest hadn’t taken off was the 4,000 square feet of retail space, about 75 percent of which has been empty since the building opened. Coffee shop Amano Vivere Cafe closed in July 2014 after about a year in business.
At the time, Chris Kirles, vice president of development with developer Flaherty & Collins, said they’d had inquiries but hadn’t found the right retail tenants.
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Cafe au Parc is open as a cafe serving breakfast and lunch from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. Mondays through Fridays and 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Saturdays, and as a wine bar between 6 p.m. and midnight Mondays through Saturdays.
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