What do you do on a Tuesday night when you want something that isn't a special occasion but isn't a sandwich at the kitchen counter either? A year ago, the honest answer in Lake Forest was shorter than it is now. Drive down Western Avenue or cut through Market Square this fall and you'll pass three places that didn't exist in their current form a year or so ago, and each one is quietly answering that Tuesday-night question in a completely different way.
None of them are competing with each other. That's the part worth noticing.
The Room That Kept Its Address and Lost Its Name
For 97 years, the space inside Deer Path Inn known as The English Room did one job: it was where the inn's identity lived. Not a rotating concept, not a seasonal refresh. The same dining room, generation after generation, through the kind of anniversaries and graduations that make a restaurant feel less like a business and more like a fixture of the town itself.
This spring, that changed. Deer Path Inn retired The English Room and opened The Brasserie in its place, a lighter, more contemporary room with brass accents, marble-topped tables, and banquette seating that trades the old formality for something the inn's general manager, James Barnett, described as designed around the art of conversation. NBC Chicago and Time Out Chicago both covered the shift when it happened in March, and the framing from both outlets was the same: this is evolution, not demolition. The bones of the space are still there. The mood isn't.
Here's the detail that's easy to miss if you only skim the press release: even though the room dropped "English" from its name, the restaurant's own booking listing still describes the concept as built around modern British charm. The name changed. The through-line didn't, not entirely. That's a small thing, but it tells you something about how deliberate this reinvention actually was. Nobody was trying to erase a century of history. They were trying to make it feel usable on a random Thursday instead of only on the nights you'd book a table three weeks out.
That's who The Brasserie is really for: hotel guests, out-of-town family, the dinner you plan around a stay rather than the dinner you fall into on your way home from work.
The Chef Who Didn't Need Another Restaurant, But Opened One Anyway
A few blocks away, a different kind of new arrived in June 2025, and it started with someone talking Bruno Abate into it.
Abate already had a restaurant named Follia in Chicago's Fulton Market, open for a quarter century, and a second one, Tocco, thriving in Winnetka since 2019. He didn't need a third location to prove anything. According to his own account of the decision, friends in Lake Forest kept asking him to bring something authentic to their town, and he eventually gave in. "I kind of need a challenge in my life," he told Lake Forest Love around the time the new location came together. With help from the Altounian family, who own the building, he found a space at 950 N. Western Ave. and brought the Follia name back for a second act.
The details he leaned on to make it feel like the original are specific enough that they're worth naming. The executive chef, Dominico Acampora, worked at the original Fulton Market Follia and brought Italy-trained hands to Lake Forest to run the kitchen. Abate has said the restaurant can turn out around 400 different dishes and more than three dozen sauces on a given day, and that the drinking glasses on every table were made on the island of Murano, off Venice, not sourced domestically. It's the kind of overbuilt attention to detail that only makes sense if you're trying to convince a town that already has plenty of Italian food that this one is different.
There's also a piece of the business that doesn't show up on the menu. Abate runs a nonprofit called Recipe for Change, a cooking and culinary training program inside Cook County Jail that he started in 2014. During a multi-day fundraiser he calls the Celebration of Good, a share of each guest's bill at Follia goes directly to that program.
Where The Brasserie was built to give an already-loyal hotel audience a reason to linger, Follia was built because the people who already lived here asked for it. That's a different kind of bet, and it shows in who ends up in the room on a Tuesday.
Three New Rooms, Three Different Nights
| Where | Changed | Built For |
|---|---|---|
| The Brasserie, Deer Path Inn | Replaced the 97-year-old English Room this spring | Hotel guests, special occasions, visiting family |
| Follia, 950 N. Western Ave. | Opened June 2025 as chef Bruno Abate's third restaurant | Residents who wanted an addition, not a replacement |
| Elawa Farm Market & community dinners | Runs its seasonal market and weekly gatherings through October 31 | Anyone who wants a night out with no reservation required |
The Third Track Nobody's Reviewing on Yelp
The quietest of the three isn't a restaurant at all, at least not in the traditional sense. Elawa Farm sits on Middlefork Drive, on land that once belonged to Elsa and A. Watson Armour, of the meatpacking family the estate takes its name from. It's one of the last intact estate farms left in the Midwest, and today it runs as a public-private partnership between the Elawa Farm Foundation and the City of Lake Forest, which owns the property and maintains the historic buildings.
The Garden Market runs Thursday through Saturday from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., open through October 31 this season, stocked with produce, eggs, and pantry goods sourced from the farm's own garden and a network of local growers. But the part that functions like a genuine answer to the going-out question is the weekly programming built around it: a recurring Grill Night, a Burger Night, and a rotating slate of cooking classes led by named local instructors, Chef Mickey Knutson's seasonal demos, Chef Ernesto of El Molcajete Sauces, pastry chef Maggie Logan's bread and sourdough sessions. None of it requires a reservation weeks out or a special outfit. It's the version of a night out that's closer to a potluck than a tasting menu, and it's been quietly building a regular crowd while Follia and The Brasserie get the press coverage.
Even the 118-Year-Old Tradition Moved Its Own Furniture
If you think the pattern here is new versus old, Lake Forest's oldest institutions would like a word. This year marks Market Square's 110th anniversary, the shopping district Howard Van Doren Shaw designed in 1916 as one of the first retail centers in the country built around the automobile, and it's still hosting its free Concerts in the Square series every summer, the same low-key draw it's offered for years.
And in August, Lake Forest Day, now in its 118th year, ran its usual two days of parade and carnival at West Park, hosted as always by American Legion McKinlock Post 264. Except this year the parade route changed, starting at the intersection of Deerpath Road and Oakwood Avenue before heading east to Western Avenue and on to the traditional finish at Westminster and West Park. The city also added a new Pre-Parade Family Party in Market Square, with free mini bagels from Once Upon a Bagel handed out to families staking out their spot before the parade began.
Even a tradition old enough to have outlived four generations of residents still gets small adjustments most years. That's not a contradiction of the restaurant stories. It's the same instinct, applied to something that was never going to close.
What Three Different Nights Out Actually Tell You
None of this adds up to Lake Forest suddenly having "more restaurants," the kind of vague upgrade a passing visitor might notice and forget. It adds up to three distinct answers to the same question, aimed at three different kinds of nights. The Brasserie is for the evening you're dressed for. Follia is for the evening a friend talked you into trying somewhere new. Elawa is for the evening you didn't plan at all, and ended up glad you went.
If you've lived here long enough to remember what used to be in each of those spots, that shift is worth paying attention to, not because it changes anything about your address, but because it's one more sign of how a town this settled still finds small ways to move.
If you're the kind of person who notices those shifts and starts wondering what it would take to plant yourself here more permanently, or you know someone weighing that decision, Anne Hardy has spent her career paying attention to exactly this kind of detail across the North Shore. Schedule a free consultation whenever you're ready to talk it through.
