Church Street Just Started Running on Somebody Else's Clock

Walk down Church Street on a Tuesday night this month and you'll notice something that wasn't there in June. The sidewalk in front of 1010 and 1012 has people on it after 8 p.m., which in downtown Evanston used to be the hour when things wound down rather than up. That's not an accident of foot traffic. It's the visible result of at least four different businesses deciding, independently and months apart, to set their own opening dates by a single date on somebody else's calendar: September 9, 2026, when Northlight Theatre raised its curtain for the first time in its own building.

If you live here, you've probably clocked the theater news and the new restaurant news as two separate stories. They aren't. The interesting part isn't that Evanston got a theater and a bar in the same season. It's that the bar, the cafe down the block, and at least one restaurant still waiting on permits all built their timing around a building that, for most of this year, was just a construction fence.

The clock nobody set

Northlight has been trying to get back to Evanston since around 2010. The company started here in 1974, spent nearly three decades performing out of the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie, and broke ground on its own 24,000-square-foot home at 1012 Church Street in March 2025. The building opened for a ribbon cutting on July 28 and started previews of its inaugural production, The Front Page, on September 9. Opening night is set for September 18, four days from now.

That date, September 9, turns out to be a hinge that other people were watching closely before the public ever saw the finished lobby.

Jeremy Adler, a Fifth Ward resident who spent his career as a wine director for Stephanie Izard's restaurant group and later as beverage director at Rosewood in Rosemont, signed a lease at 1010 Church Street, right next door to Northlight, back in January. He told the Daily Northwestern he'd been circling a restaurant of his own for years, and once he heard the theater was finally coming back to downtown, he knew he'd found the spot. He aimed to open weeks before Northlight's first curtain, not after, so his staff could work out service kinks on regular nights before a theater crowd walked in expecting a smooth pre-show dinner.

"I want to be able to work out kinks. I would like to have polished service that is refined, but also welcoming, hospitable. That's a balance that you really have to practice before you get it right."

Adler's restaurant, The Addled Bunny, officially opened August 18. That's three weeks of quiet Tuesdays and Wednesdays before Northlight's first ticket holder ever needed a table.

What's actually open right now

If you're deciding what to do this week, here's the current state of Church Street, not the eventual one.

• Northlight Theatre, 1012 Church St. The Front Page is in previews now and opens officially September 18, running through October 18. It's a 1930s newsroom comedy, adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher from the Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur original, directed by artistic director BJ Jones and starring Kate Fry and Timothy Edward Kane. The building seats 287 and has a bar in the lobby if you want a drink before you sit down.
• The Addled Bunny, 1010 Church St., in the space that used to be That Little Mexican Cafe. Open Tuesday through Sunday for brunch, lunch, and dinner, with the kitchen and bar running until midnight on Fridays and Saturdays. The dining room seats about 100 across banquettes and booths, the bar seats another dozen, and there are high-boy tables along the Church Street windows. Interior designer Tom Ullo gave the place deep blue walls and moon-like globe fixtures that read more evening sky than sports bar. The menu leans into a rabbit paella and a fried goat cheese appetizer finished with house-made chili honey, and the cocktail list runs $16 across the board with several clarified milk punches you won't find at most places in town.
• Soul & Smoke, the flagship location, rolled out an expanded evening menu at the start of September. Chef D'Andre Carter and sommelier Heather Bublick pushed the dinner menu past standard barbecue into dishes like smoked oxtail rolled in a collard green leaf, plated in a glass vessel meant to look like a cigar. Two Icee machines pour nonalcoholic slushes that can be spiked on request, which is either a novelty or exactly the kind of detail that gets repeated at every table for a month.
• A few blocks up, Windfree Solar Cafe quietly extended its hours and started serving beer and wine the same week Northlight opened. Nobody announced this as part of a coordinated plan, but the timing lines up with everything else on this list.

Who else is setting a watch by September

Not everyone made it in time for opening week, and that's its own piece of information if you're trying to read where this corridor goes next.

Kim and Clark aren't newcomers looking for a cheap lease. They've run Parachute in Chicago's Avondale neighborhood since 2012, a restaurant that held a Michelin star from 2014 to 2021 and earned them the James Beard Award for Best Chef in the Great Lakes region in 2019. Their Evanston plan is being financed in part by roughly fifteen local investors, which means the money betting on this corridor isn't only coming from outside it. Kim told the Evanston RoundTable she wants the new spot to feel like something people walk into on a whim, more casual than her Chicago restaurants, and specifically chose the alley location because of how it connects into the rest of downtown.

None of these businesses coordinated with each other directly. What they coordinated with was the same public timeline: groundbreaking in 2025, a ribbon cutting in July, a first show in September. That's the part worth sitting with. A single building's construction schedule became the de facto opening calendar for an entire block of hospitality investment, and residents are the ones who get to walk into all of it arriving roughly at once instead of trickling in over three years.

The two weeks you're standing in right now

If you want the practical version of all this, here's where you are on the calendar as of today.

Folk Fest wrapped up on the lakefront this past weekend, September 12 and 13, which means the last big outdoor draw of the season is behind you. Northlight's preview run is happening right now, with opening night landing this Friday, September 18. Two days after that, on Sunday, September 20, Downtown Evanston is closing off Sherman Avenue between Clark and Church for its final Cars & Coffee gathering of the year, free and open to anyone who wants to look at vintage pre-2000 cars from 9:30 to noon. That's roughly 75 cars on a stretch of pavement two blocks from where Adler is pouring milk punches and where Kate Fry is rehearsing lines for opening night.

The Thursday Night Market and the Downtown Summer Sounds concert series both wrapped for the year on September 3, so if you're used to Thursday evenings at Fountain Square, that particular routine is on pause until next summer. What's replacing it, at least for the next several weeks, is a theater with a bar in the lobby and a restaurant next door that spent all August getting ready for exactly this moment.

None of this requires you to do anything except decide what night you're free. But if you've been meaning to catch a play, this is the week the building you'd be sitting in has been building toward since March of last year, and the restaurant next to it planned its own opening around making sure you'd have somewhere good to eat first.

If you're weighing a move within Evanston, or just curious what a stretch like this does to the value of living four blocks from it instead of four miles, that's a longer conversation, and one Jimmy Styx is always happy to have over coffee, no pressure, no pitch, just a local read on what's changing and why.