Al's Meat Market Closed After Twenty Years. The Reason Is Two Blocks Away.
September 17, 2026
September 17, 2026
For more than two decades, Al's Meat Market held its corner at 1165 Wilmette Ave, the kind of shop where the person behind the counter knew your name and your Thanksgiving order by heart. In early January 2026, owner Joe Spera retired and the counter went dark for good.
If you only read the closing notice, you'd assume this was one more small business calling it quits after a long run, the ordinary math of retirement. But the space isn't sitting empty and it isn't becoming another butcher shop or another bakery. A cocktail bar and lounge called The Mette is taking it over, and the reason a meat counter turned into a bar tells you more about what's happening in Wilmette right now than any single storefront could on its own. The engine behind it sits two blocks east, on Sheridan Road, inside a hundred-year-old shopping center with a Spanish bell tower.
Plaza del Lago opened in 1928 as Spanish Court, and it still holds the distinction of being the second-oldest open-air shopping center in the country. For most of the last decade it was a pleasant but unremarkable stretch of Sheridan Road anchored by a Jewel-Osco and a CVS. That changed in June 2022, when Boston-based WS Development bought the property and started rebuilding it storefront by storefront, restoring the original stucco facades and the bell tower while re-tenanting nearly the entire center.
The pace since then has been genuinely unusual for a North Shore shopping center. WS Development has signed 21 leases for new retail and restaurant space at Plaza del Lago, a scale of turnover that would be notable in a mall many times its size, let alone a few acres of storefronts along the lake. Here's roughly how it's broken down:
Already open, as of this fall:
Still arriving:
Jewel-Osco, CVS, Starbucks, and Convito Café & Market remain in place through the construction, which is worth noting because it means the center isn't trading its everyday utility for exclusivity. It's layering luxury retail and dining on top of a shopping center residents already used for groceries and errands.
The Henry's opening alone brought real hiring to the village. The restaurant held an on-site job fair from late April through mid-May 2026 and hired 164 people across front of house, back of house, and management, an unusually large number for a single restaurant opening in a town this size.
Here's where the meat counter comes back in. The Mette isn't a straightforward restaurant with a bar attached. It's built around a business model where the majority of sales come from alcohol rather than food, and Wilmette's existing liquor code didn't have a classification that permitted that ratio. Village trustees had to consider creating a new license category to accommodate it.
That's a small piece of municipal process, but it tells you something a listing description never would. A village doesn't rewrite its liquor code for one bar in isolation. It does it when the surrounding retail environment has already demonstrated there's an audience for evening spending, and Plaza del Lago has been building exactly that case. The Henry was planned to stay open until 10 p.m., pouring cocktails alongside its seasonal menu. Hermès and Oscar de la Renta bring a different kind of foot traffic than a supermarket anchor ever did. The Mette's arrival on Wilmette Ave reads less like an isolated bet and more like downtown catching up to what the plaza has already proven.
As of this summer, the space was still mid-buildout, well past the spring target The Mette's team had originally set when they took possession in mid-January. Licensing questions and construction timelines have a way of running long together, and that's a pattern worth watching if you're curious whether the pace of change downtown holds or slows.
Plaza del Lago's rebuild hasn't just pulled national luxury brands in. It's also pushed a few longtime tenants out, and where they landed says something about the relationship between the two commercial strips. Yellow Bird Stationery and Chantilly Lace, both former Plaza del Lago tenants, relocated to downtown Wilmette rather than closing outright.
That's a small detail, but it matters if you're trying to understand how these two shopping districts function together rather than as competitors. The plaza is trading up toward Hermès-tier retail, and the businesses that don't fit that positioning anymore aren't disappearing. They're resettling a few blocks west, which means downtown Wilmette's retail mix is being shaped in part by decisions made at the plaza, not just by what's available to lease on Wilmette Ave itself.
Put the pieces together and you get a walk that wasn't really possible in 2023. Start at Plaza del Lago for lunch or an early dinner at The Henry, whose menu runs to dishes like short rib potstickers and Korean-style prime skirt steak with fried rice. Browse the Arcade, where Dôen is settling in this fall alongside Studs and Lilly Pulitzer. Walk or drive the couple of blocks into the village center, where Small Cheval, a spinoff of Chicago's Au Cheval, took over the former Depot Nuevo space at 1139 Wilmette Ave with its stripped-down menu of burgers, fries, fried chicken, and hand-dipped ice cream. Note the storefront that used to be Al's, and watch for The Mette's build-out if it's still underway.
If you want to see the third leg of this, head west to Edens Plaza, which WS Development also owns and redeveloped starting in 2022. Wayfair opened its first brick-and-mortar department store there in May 2024, in the former Carson Pirie Scott building, and it's reportedly become one of the village's top sales tax generators since. Three shopping districts, one developer's strategy, and a noticeably different Wilmette than the one that existed before any of this construction started.
None of this required Al's Meat Market to close. Joe Spera could have sold the business to another butcher, or the space could have sat vacant for a while, as commercial spaces sometimes do. Instead it became a bar that needed a license category the village didn't have yet, timed almost exactly to a stretch of Sheridan Road going from sleepy to genuinely upscale in under four years.
If you've lived in Wilmette long enough to remember when Plaza del Lago was just a place to grab groceries, the version taking shape now is worth watching, not because every change is an improvement, but because it's clearly not finished. More leases are still working through construction, more storefronts downtown may shift with them, and the shape of a Wilmette weekend a year from now will likely look different again.
Whether you're weighing what a changing retail scene means for your own street or you're simply curious where the next relocation lands, it helps to have someone paying attention to the details as closely as the village trustees are. Cornelia Matache has spent more than three decades watching how neighborhoods like Wilmette actually change, block by block, and is always glad to talk through what it might mean for you. Get your complimentary home valuation and expert consultation whenever you're ready for that conversation.
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