Between various food journalism personages on Twitter, we’ve come up with a list of no fewer than nine restaurants that may open this week. Not all are as major as, say, Grace, but even so, two or three is probably a pretty high number for a typical week, so why are we getting such a bounty two weeks before Christmas? Well, one reason is that it’s two weeks before Christmas, and nobody wants to open closer than that (and be sadly empty on Christmas Eve because no one knows you exist yet), so openings that might happen closer are instead being squeezed further from either side of that holiday. Another is that restaurants of a certain ambition want to qualify for “Best of 2012” lists, though that doesn’t really explain a lot of the places on the list, either. And finally, the fact is that January is famously a somewhat dead month in the biz, so if you’re about to open, you might as well get as much of freespending December as you can, especially New Year’s. Anyway, besides the ones we’ve already mentioned, Grace and Little Goat Bread, here are seven more places on their way this week, apparently; hat tip to Sarah Freeman of Zagat who had the most comprehensive list in her head.
• Edzo’s is opening its Lincoln Park location Tuesday. Not that you exactly need a preview of Edzo’s, we expect, but Thrillist has some pictures to get you hungrier.
• Also opening a second location is South Loop breakfast spot Waffles, reportedly on Wednesday; they’ll be in Lakeview at 3617 N. Broadway.
• This is pretty cool: House of Glunz in Old Town, the ancient and mysterious liquor store and distributor, apparently had an entire tavern on its property at one time, which was closed when Prohibition came in and used as storage space. Some of the fixtures at the new old The Glunz Tavern are original, others have been salvaged from other vintage German spots like The Berghoff and Red Star Inn— in the latter case, pieces that have been in storage themselves since 1970. Allen Sternweiler (The Butcher & the Burger) created the menu; you can see a preview video at Thrillist here. It opens tonight.
• The LM space in Lincoln Square will become Gather, a farm to table contemporary American restaurant with extensive vegetarian options. It opens tomorrow.
• This is a big one if it’s true, it’s also a maybe, so stay tuned: the new incarnation of Bub City, the Melmans’ River North country and western themed joint, is rumored to be opening, in some degree of softness perhaps, as early as Thursday. [Eater]
• Ward Eight is a cocktail lounge and restaurant which will open (with an official mayoral ribbon-cutting in Evanston tomorrow; if Evanston’s cocktail scene doesn’t exactly thrill you, recognize that it’s about to take a step up, judging by who’s involved here— the former owners of Andersonville’s much-loved In Fine Spirits.
• Municipal Bar + Dining Co., a huge and lavish Chicago-history-themed sports bar in River North, will debut on Saturday.
Got any more? We’ll update as we hear about them. (Hmm… anybody heard anything about The Boarding House? They’ve got to be close…)
