"For 97 years, our dining spaces have been central to the inn's identity and a gathering place for the community," James Barnett, general manager of Deer Path Inn, said when the hotel opened its new restaurant this spring. He was talking about a dining room that just changed names for the first time in nearly a century. That single sentence is a decent summary of what's happened to Lake Forest's evening life this year: the oldest anchors in town got reinvented rather than replaced, and a chef who built his name two towns over decided his next move belonged here instead.
If you've been driving to Winnetka for a certain kind of dinner, or treating Deer Path Inn as an occasional-occasion place, both of those habits are worth reconsidering right now. The pull isn't coming from somewhere new. It's coming from two blocks around Market Square and Deerpath, at the same time the farm five minutes away is running its own parallel calendar of supper nights. Late August is the week all of it stacks up.
The English Room is gone. What replaced it changes the math.
Deer Path Inn's dining room spent nearly a century as The English Room, the kind of name that becomes a fixture rather than a menu item. This spring the inn retired it and opened The Brasserie in the same space, with brighter finishes, brass accents, smaller marble-topped tables, and banquette seating built around what the hotel calls the art of conversation.
The bigger change for residents is the schedule. The Brasserie is now open from 6 a.m. on weekdays and 6:30 a.m. on weekends through 10 p.m., covering breakfast, brunch, lunch, dinner, drinks, and dessert in one continuous run. That's a different kind of commitment than an occasional dinner reservation. It puts a full-day option inside a nearly century-old building that most Lake Forest residents have filed under special occasions, not regular rotation.
"The Brasserie represents an important evolution for Deer Path Inn," Barnett said. "It feels familiar, yet unmistakably new."
Familiar is the operative word. The building, the location, the staff continuity are all unchanged. What moved is the hours and the register the room is trying to hit, from formal to conversational.
Follia is two miles closer than the Winnetka version
The second piece of this is Bruno Abate, the chef who opened his first Follia in New York's Meatpacking District and then built Tocco into a fixture on Winnetka's dining scene. This year he brought the Follia name to 950 N Western Ave in Lake Forest, a short walk from Market Square.
That detail matters more than a standard restaurant opening because it reverses a direction Lake Forest diners have gotten used to. For years, if you wanted Abate's kind of Italian cooking, whether handmade pasta or a curated wine list, you drove south into Winnetka. Now the newer of his two Illinois restaurants sits inside Lake Forest, open Tuesday through Sunday from 5 p.m., with the courtyard patio drawing the kind of praise that suggests it's becoming a warm-weather habit rather than a one-time visit.
Put those two facts together and the pattern is plain. Lake Forest didn't get a new restaurant scene bolted onto it from outside. It got the destination version of two things that used to require leaving town: an all-day flagship at one of its oldest addresses, and a chef's newer project pulled north from a neighboring suburb that has, until now, generally been the one doing the pulling.
Where the actual weekend is happening
Market Square itself has been Lake Forest's commercial anchor since 1916, and its current retail mix, from Williams-Sonoma to J.McLaughlin to the Daily Grind, is the kind of steady lineup that rarely makes news. What does make news, at least on a week-to-week basis, is the free concert series the Lake Forest Parks and Recreation department runs there through the summer.
This Friday, August 21, the Concert in the Square and Classic Car Show series brings Roger That, a 50s and 60s surf music act, to Market Square. It's one date on a series that's been running through the season, but this particular week it's not landing alone.
The night before, on Thursday, August 20, the Gorton Center on East Illinois Road has The Brothers Doobie on its stage at 7:30 p.m. Two live shows on consecutive nights, one at the town's historic shopping square and one at its established performing arts venue, both within walking distance of the restaurants that just reinvented themselves. That's not a coincidence built by any single organization. It's what happens when a town's summer programming, its restaurant calendar, and its farm calendar all peak in the same three-week window without coordinating with each other.
| Date | What | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Thu, Aug 20 | The Brothers Doobie, live | Gorton Center, 400 E Illinois Rd |
| Fri, Aug 21 | Roger That (50s/60s surf music), Concert in the Square & Classic Car Show | Market Square |
| Thu–Sat, ongoing through Oct 31 | Elawa Farm Garden Market, 8 a.m.–3 p.m. | Elawa Farm, 1401 N Middlefork Dr |
| Sun, ongoing through Oct 31 | Elawa Farm Garden Market, 10 a.m.–3 p.m. | Elawa Farm |
Elawa Farm is running its own calendar in parallel
Elawa Farm, named for original owners Elsa and A. Watson Armour of the meatpacking family and built as a gentleman's farm more than a century ago, is one of the last intact Midwest estate farms still doing what it was built to do. Its Garden Market runs Thursday through Saturday from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. through October 31, selling locally sourced produce, farm-fresh eggs, and a curated mix of artisan goods.
That's the daytime calendar. The farm also runs a separate evening one: a weekly Burger Night, a Summer Grill Night series, and an August Farm Dinner built around the last of the season's stone fruit, timed to catch the exact stretch of late summer when a garden still has something worth celebrating before fall crops take over. Residents who know Elawa only as a Saturday-morning produce stop are missing the half of its calendar that runs after dark.
The week everything overlaps
None of this reads as a single event. It reads as a town whose oldest fixtures are getting reworked at the same time its newest arrival is pulling weight away from a neighboring suburb, while a hundred-year-old farm quietly runs two separate calendars five minutes from Market Square. The residents who plan around all three, the Brasserie's new all-day hours, Follia's patio nights, and Elawa's dinner series, get a version of Lake Forest that doesn't show up if you're only checking one of them.
That's the actual shift worth noticing this month. The town's center of gravity for an evening out didn't move to a new neighborhood or a new development. It moved into buildings that were already here, under new names and new hours, at the exact moment a chef from two towns over decided this was where his next kitchen belonged.
If you're weighing what it would mean to put down roots somewhere that keeps reinventing its own institutions instead of replacing them with something generic, that's worth a conversation. Heidi Picard Properties works with buyers and sellers across Lake Forest and the rest of the North Shore, and a home valuation and consultation is a good place to start if this is the kind of town you're picturing yourself in.
