Hundreds of downtown restaurants shut their doors in 2020, and many never reopened. But Rishi Kumar, an owner and culinary director of Mariela, a new restaurant at the corner of Washington and State streets, said he now sees the Loop as a great place to do business.
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“Bringing the culinary scene back to life downtown has been a long-time dream,” he said.
Kumar and his partners opened Mariela in May, and they’re far from alone. Nearly 20 downtown restaurants, cafes and dessert shops opened in the spring, with another 20 opening in the summer or following months, according to a report from the nonprofit Chicago Loop Alliance.
The new businesses include Japan-based Hello Kitty Cafe and other international brands, national chains such as Panda Express and Portillo’s, along with European-style cafes run by local entrepreneurs. And unlike the recent past, when most new restaurants popped up near the tourist-heavy Chicago River, this year they’re spread across the central business district.
“The riverfront and Riverwalk are attractive aspects of the downtown area, but now we are seeing a definite uptick in business investment, including a number of restaurant projects coming to fruition throughout the Loop,” said Suzet McKinney, president and CEO of the Chicago Loop Alliance.
New restaurants can have a big impact on the downtown’s office market and its fast-growing residential sector, said Karoline Eigel, a commercial real estate broker with Cushman & Wakefield. Office workers and downtown apartment dwellers are always on the lookout for innovative restaurants or cafes where they can hang out, she added, so a batch of new places makes the Loop a more attractive neighborhood.
“It seems like every week there’s a new restaurant announced,” Eigel said. “Having empty space on a building’s ground floor is a bad look, so a new restaurant is a huge advantage. It absolutely can boost a building’s value and improve the tenant experience.”
The pandemic dried up much of the Loop’s lunchtime business, so many restaurant owners could no longer afford downtown rents, said John Vance, principal at Stone Real Estate. But landlords are now more likely to offer generous terms, perhaps including lower rents, and that’s helped local entrepreneurs without deep financial pockets gain a foothold downtown, he said.
“That was a hard thing for landlords to do, but it’s where we are right now in the Loop,” Vance said. “If you want good, interesting food and beverage, you need local innovators.”
Chicago-based Groundswell Coffee Roasters opened in late July in the historic Fine Arts Building at 410 S. Michigan Ave. Jacob Harvey, managing artistic director of the 10-story artists’ haven, said offering new food options is key to its multimillion dollar restoration.
“People really have been clamoring for this,” he said. “I can’t speak to the details of the lease, but obviously we want everyone to be set up for success, and it was a win-win situation for everybody.”
The building is also getting ready to fill the ground-floor space occupied for 60 years by the Artists Cafe, which closed in 2019.
“It is now on the market to become a restaurant again,” Harvey said.
Kumar was checking out Loop spaces for a possible restaurant several years ago, but economic conditions still looked iffy, so in 2024 he instead helped open Mirra, a restaurant in Bucktown on the North Side.
“Downtown business did not look safe or exciting then, and rents were so high,” Kumar said. “That plays a part in where you go. Restaurant owners are the ones who most often get choked out by the economy, so coming downtown can be a big risk.”
But this year, the Staypineapple hotel in the historic Reliance Building wanted a new restaurant to invigorate its ground floor at 1 W. Washington St. It offered Kumar and partners Zubair Mohajir and David Mor a good deal, and since the streets seemed more active, often crowded with hungry tourists or office workers, this time they jumped at the chance, he said.
The Singapore-raised Kumar said he wanted to give Chicago a new kind of seafood restaurant, one that blended coastal cuisines from across the globe, including South Asia and the Mediterranean.
“I’ve spent my whole life in restaurants,” Kumar said. “You see the beauty they can bring to a city or the small corner of a neighborhood. A lot of our chef friends said it’s going to be tough in the Loop, but the hotel is working with us so we can succeed, and to us, we’re giving back to Chicago.”
The number of potential customers will likely increase in mid-2027, Kumar pointed out, when downtown welcomes thousands of Google employees to the tech firm’s new regional headquarters in the renovated James R. Thompson Center.
Google has not disclosed its plans for either new restaurants or retail on the lower floors of the Thompson Center, which hosted a massive food court until the building’s 2022 closure.
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Michael Marrese, managing partner of Morgan & Morgan, said a rich dining scene was one reason he chose to open the national law firm’s first downtown Chicago office at 161 N. Clark St.
“Good restaurants bring positive energy to the whole office culture, and make it a place where you like to go to work,” he said. “We will have 100-plus employees before you know it, and people always want a place to get a smoothie or a coffee.”
Canadian developer Onni Group bought 161 N. Clark St., located across the street from Google’s future home, for $125 million in March.
The developer plans to launch a complete rehab of the 50-story structure. In 2021, Onni purchased the former AT&T headquarters nearby at 225 W. Randolph St. and completed a $140 million gut rehab, eventually filling up the once nearly vacant building with dozens of new tenants, including Solette, a ground-floor casual restaurant.
Marrese said he sampled some of the neighborhood’s Greek and Italian restaurants soon after opening the firm’s Loop office this summer, and was pleased the streets were crowded on many mornings.
“People told me the Loop wasn’t that busy, but in the few months I’ve been here, it’s been increasing,” he said. “I can only imagine how much more vibrant it will be when Google opens. It’s going to be just bustling.”
The downtown office market has a long way to go before it’s fully recovered. The overall vacancy rate stood at 24.4% in this year’s second quarter, still close to its historic high, according to commercial real estate firm Colliers. But office tenants also took an additional 464,000 square feet of space in the second quarter, the highest quarterly total seen downtown since before the pandemic.
As of July 2026, Chicago’s central business district was 68.1% as busy when compared with July 2019, according to Avison Young’s Office Busyness Index. That’s up from the 51.2% recorded for July 2023.
Many office workers still work from home several days per week, and downtown restaurant owners say it hurts to miss several big lunch hours. Mondays in July were 45.7% as busy when compared with the same days in July 2019, Avison Young found, making it downtown Chicago’s weakest day. Thursdays in July were the most active, with the Busyness Index hitting 101.2%, making it the only day of the week to surpass pre-pandemic foot traffic.
Vance said he expects downtown restaurants will thrive even if the full five-day workweek never returns. He pointed out that developers are converting several dozen aging office towers into apartment buildings, and once complete, these projects will likely draw thousands of new residents. Combined with the growing number of tourists visiting Chicago each year, that’s an entirely new customer base, so downtown restaurants should be serving meals and drinks seven days a week.
“Now there’s going to be a dinner business and happy hours, not just lunch, and on Saturday and Sunday mornings restaurants will have a great breakfast business,” Vance said.
The Loop is becoming a place to hang out, said Ted Maglaris, who in August opened Prasino, an all-day Mediterranean-style cafe at 33 S. Wabash Ave.
“You can sit here for two hours and no one is going to bother you,” he said. “Restaurants are busy again, but there still aren’t enough places where people can just socialize.”
Maglaris runs another Prasino in west suburban La Grange, and plans to open by 2027 several more near downtown, including in Fulton Market and on the Riverwalk.
“Some people said, ‘Why are you going downtown?’” he said. “They don’t realize that there is heavy traffic here. I agree that you can’t make money in a restaurant just doing five days a week, but I’m drawing in tourists, students, residents and office workers. I don’t think there is another market where I can touch all four types of business.”
Some of Chicago’s oldest restaurants are also launching new sit-down cafes.
Italian Village Restaurants at 71 W. Monroe St., owned by the Capitanini family for almost 100 years, opened Café Pisolino in May on their building’s ground floor.
The family was forced to close two of their three restaurants when COVID hit, said Italian Village Restaurants President Jonathan Capitanini. But as foot traffic returned, they noticed far more young people on the street, many in their 20s, perhaps just starting their careers. A recent family trip to Italy inspired them to create a Loop cafe with an Italian-style ambiance, a place where office workers and others can grab quick coffees, nibble pastries or spend an afternoon sipping espresso.
“(Young people) are looking for experiences that the Loop was not offering,” Capitanini said. “We looked at coffee shops in the neighborhood and thought, we could do better.”
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Saturdays are the busiest days, Capitanini said, and he expects business to further improve when The Bellwether, a 117-unit apartment building at 79 W. Monroe St., opens in the coming weeks.
It’s the first of six office-to-residential conversions financed by the city’s LaSalle Corridor Revitalization plan. Nearly 20 other privately financed conversions are planned or underway throughout downtown.
“This cafe is something that the Loop could have much more of in the near future,” Capitanini said.