Ann Sather Left Belmont Avenue This Summer. Here's What's Replacing an Entire Block.

If you walk west from the Belmont Red Line stop this week, the corridor looks like it's mid-sentence. Ann Sather's flagship diner, a fixture at 909 W. Belmont Avenue for decades, closed this summer as its building heads toward redevelopment. Two doors down, the Giordano's that's sat on Belmont near Kenmore and Seminary for years just cleared its final City Council hurdle for demolition. And at the corner of Belmont and Halsted, a 60,000-square-foot retail building has stood mostly dark since 2023, waiting on a grocery tenant that never showed up until this spring.

None of these are isolated closures. They're the same four-block stretch of Belmont Avenue resolving three separate multi-year vacancies within roughly a year of each other, and the thing replacing the Ann Sather building is Foxtrot, the specialty grocer that disappeared from this exact neighborhood when its parent company collapsed in 2024. If you've lived in Lakeview long enough to remember when that Foxtrot on Clark and Diversey was still open, the timing is worth sitting with.

The Diner Left, the Grocer Is Coming Back to the Same Building

Ann Sather told CBS Chicago it was actively hunting for a new Lakeview address and hoped to be settled before the end of summer, after leaving 909 W. Belmont as the block around it moves into redevelopment. That space is becoming the second phase of Belmora, a five-story, 46-apartment project from Chicago-based Mavrek Development, and Foxtrot has now confirmed it's taking retail space at 917 W. Belmont as part of that build, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.

The Foxtrot coming back won't look like the old one. Reporting from WhatNow Chicago describes a smaller footprint tucked next to Naz's Halal Food and directly across from a Taco Bell, a short walk from the Belmont CTA platform. Foxtrot's own chief operating officer framed it as rejoining a neighborhood the brand had already built relationships in, which is a fair way to describe a company returning to the same three blocks it left behind less than two years earlier. Belmora's first phase, at 919 W. Belmont, is targeting a fall opening this year. The Foxtrot half of the project sits on the old Ann Sather footprint at 917 W. Belmont, where a demolition permit has already been issued, and the Sun-Times reports the store itself isn't expected to open until next year.

Stuffed Crust to Scaffolding on the Next Block

A few storefronts down, the Giordano's at 1040 W. Belmont is headed for the same fate that hit the old Lakeview State Bank building a few blocks east. Chicago's City Council approved the zoning change clearing the way for its demolition this summer, with Kiferbaum Development Group and Jonathan Splitt Architects behind a five-story building running roughly 72 to 76 feet tall, according to Chicago YIMBY's coverage of the zoning filing. The plan calls for 28 apartments, six of them designated affordable under the city's ordinance, plus 4,400 square feet of ground-floor retail split into two separate storefronts facing Belmont.

What the approval doesn't include is a closing date for Giordano's itself. No timeline for when the pizzeria would actually shut its doors had been made public even after the council vote, meaning the stuffed crust is still available on Belmont even though the zoning fight is already over.

Here's how the three projects line up on paper:

The Building That Sat Empty for Two Years Finally Signs a Grocer

The third piece is the Lakeview Connection building at Belmont and Halsted, which replaced a 1921 bank building that Preservation Chicago fought to save with a petition that gathered more than 2,000 signatures before it came down in 2021. The replacement opened in 2023 with a single tenant, a Fifth Third Bank branch on the corner, and sat otherwise dark for two years while an Amazon Fresh that was supposed to anchor the space never materialized.

Whole Foods signed on as that anchor tenant this spring, according to Block Club Chicago's reporting on the lease. The move traces back to Amazon's decision to shutter its Fresh and Go store formats and convert some of those built-out spaces into Whole Foods locations instead, which is how a vacant Lakeview retail box ended up with a national grocery tenant it was never originally supposed to get. VCA Blum Animal Hospital is also relocating into the building from its current spot on North Clark Street. Once open, it will be the third Whole Foods within a few blocks of this stretch of Halsted, joining existing stores at 3640 N. Halsted and 3201 N. Ashland, though no opening date has been confirmed yet.

Two Blocks South, Southport Is Running the Opposite Playbook

What makes the Belmont story land differently is what's happening two blocks south on Southport, where nothing is being demolished and the calendar just keeps refilling itself. The 13th annual Lakeview Taco Fest closed out the Southport Corridor's summer the weekend of August 21 through 23, with more than a dozen vendors including 2025 winners Beat Kitchen and Cabos Tacos competing under the CTA Brown Line tracks, plus nightly lucha libre matches at Southport and Cornelia.

The rest of the fall calendar is already set:

• Low-Line Market runs Tuesdays from 3 to 7 p.m. under the Brown Line viaduct at 3410 N. Southport through September 29, organized by the Lakeview Roscoe Village Chamber of Commerce
• Dine Out on Broadway, now in its sixth season, closes Broadway to traffic between Belmont and Wellington for a stretch of patio dining and mimosa carafes
• Lakeview East Festival of the Arts brings more than 150 artists to the neighborhood September 19 and 20, according to Choose Chicago's official festival guide
• Oktoberfest Chicago returns to St. Alphonsus September 25 through 27 with craft beer, live bands, and a kids' Kinderfest

Southport's model runs on recurring programming funded partly through Special Service Area 27, the localized property tax levy that supports Friends of Lakeview's placemaking work. Belmont's model right now is structural, three separate long-stalled properties all getting resolved in the same calendar year. Both are true at once, a few hundred feet apart.

The Food Map Is Turning Over Faster Than the Buildings

While the real estate side plays out over months, the restaurant map has already moved. Uncle John's BBQ, a South Side institution that traces back to pitmaster Mack Sevier's original spot near 69th and Calumet in 2005, opened its second-ever location on August 26 at 947 W. Addison, directly beneath the Addison Red Line stop and across from Wrigley Field, according to Block Club Chicago. It's owned by Darryl and Andrea Townsend, the same couple behind Dat Donut, which expanded to Lakeview in 2025.

Milly's Pizza in the Pan, ranked No. 1 in Chicago Magazine's pizza rankings and built from a pandemic-era ghost kitchen in Logan Square, opened its Lakeview location at 3409 N. Broadway in mid-March. Apothecary, a cocktail bar from pharmacist-turned-owner Eric Reid, opened on Clark Street in May with a menu built around eucalyptus and fermented ingredients. And Luckycat Café, an Asian-inspired spot from Stephanie Bian and Jake Lee that built its following through pop-ups at Boonie's in Lincoln Square, landed its first permanent home at 2806 N. Clark near the busy Clark, Broadway, and Diversey intersection.

None of these openings required a demolition permit. That's the difference between the two stories running through Lakeview at once. The restaurant scene turns over in months. The buildings take years, and three of them are finally catching up at the same time.

What This Actually Means If You Live Here

If you've been wondering when Ann Sather is coming back, the honest answer is that the company had not publicly named a new address as of its last update, though it was aiming to be settled somewhere in Lakeview before summer's end. If you've been circling the empty Lakeview Connection building wondering what's going in, it's Whole Foods, but there's still no opening date. And if you've been planning around Giordano's still being there, it is, for now, even though the building around it has already cleared the city's approval process.

The pattern worth remembering is that Belmont Avenue between Clark and Halsted has spent the better part of two years in a kind of holding pattern, three properties stuck between what they used to be and what they're becoming. This year, all three finally started moving.

Wenzel Select Properties keeps an eye on these shifts because they shape what it actually feels like to live in a place, not because every storefront change is a market signal. If you're curious about what a specific block or building means for the neighborhood long term, or you're weighing a move within Lakeview or into the western suburbs down the road, Wenzel Select Properties is happy to talk through it whenever the timing is right for you.