Downtown Des Plaines Keeps Buying Its Own Buildings Before Turning Them Into Restaurants

Stand at the corner of Lee and Ellinwood on any weekday afternoon and you'll see it: a three-story marble building, empty windows covered in plywood, a chain-link perimeter around a construction zone that used to be the lobby of Des Plaines State Bank. Peer through a gap in the fencing and you can still make out the vault door, standing open, going nowhere for now. Ask anyone waiting for the bus what's happening to it and they'll probably say some version of "a restaurant, I think," followed by a shrug about when.

That shrug is the real story. Des Plaines residents have been watching buildings like this one sit half-finished for so long that the pattern itself has become part of the neighborhood's texture. What most people haven't connected is that the pattern is not restaurants discovering Des Plaines. It's the city of Des Plaines discovering restaurants, buying the real estate first, and then recruiting someone to fill it. The bank building at 678 Lee St is owned by the city, not by whoever eventually serves you dinner there. So is the former Leona's building three blocks away. So is the Masonic Temple on Miner Street. Downtown's restaurant wave is a municipal acquisition strategy wearing a dinner menu.

The city already had a hit before it tried this twice

The template got its test run in 2023, when the Des Plaines Park District, which owned a shuttered Good Shepherd Lutheran Church on the shore of Lake Opeka, partnered with restaurateur David Villegas to convert the roughly 15,000-square-foot building into The Foxtail on the Lake. Villegas kept the original stained glass and the church's lighting fixtures, and placed a piece of the altar over the host stand. It worked. The restaurant now seats 210 inside and another 115 on a lakefront patio, and it built its reputation the way word-of-mouth restaurants do, one weekend brunch crowd at a time.

That success is why Villegas is the name attached to nearly everything downtown is doing next. His company, 10 Scents, is the operator the city picked for the bank building. The Foxtail model wasn't a one-off. It was a proof of concept the city intends to run again, and again.

What's actually happening inside the vault

The bank building deal is the biggest version of this yet. Des Plaines purchased the property in 2024 and is now spending nearly $11 million to renovate it, with contracts awarded this month to Paul Borg Construction Co. for the interior work and Otto Baum Co. to restore the marble facade, according to reporting from the Daily Herald. Villegas' 10 Scents will separately spend about $4.5 million on kitchen equipment, furniture, and fixtures once the shell is ready. The city also secured Villegas a Cook County property tax incentive worth roughly $3.5 million over 12 years, which required officially declaring the 99-year-old building "blighted," a formal designation that unlocks the tax break regardless of how the building actually looks.

The restaurant will be called The Dime, a name Villegas landed on after a research trip to New York with his business partner Tim Canning, when the two passed a defunct Brooklyn landmark called The Dime Savings Bank on the way to JFK. The logo, a flag bearing a reproduction of a U.S. ten-cent piece, was designed by Villegas' niece. Inside, the old bank vault will become a private dining room that seats up to 16 people, and the building's third floor is being held for private events.

None of this happens fast. The project was first announced in February 2025, and it's now targeting a 2027 opening, roughly two years of council votes, contractor bids, and incentive agreements between announcement and doors open. Mayor Andrew Goczkowski has been candid about why he thinks the wait is worth it. "I think that life and activity is going to reinvigorate the whole area," he told the Daily Herald, describing a vision of couples on dates and coworkers on lunch breaks that spills foot traffic toward the Des Plaines Theatre and the rest of Ellinwood Street.

Not every old building gets this treatment

The mechanism isn't magic, and it doesn't guarantee a restaurant at the end. A few blocks from the bank, the century-old brick building that once housed Oliveti's Italian Ristorante is also being renovated rather than replaced, this time by a team affiliated with Park Ridge's Harp & Fiddle restaurant. The city structured that deal differently, offering a $3.6 million loan at 3 percent interest with up to $1.2 million forgiven once the certificate of occupancy is issued, rather than buying the building outright. Interior demolition was underway by June 2026, according to Journal & Topics, but no opening date has been set.

Other properties in the city's growing downtown portfolio haven't moved at all. Des Plaines bought the former Leona's pizza building at 1504 Miner St for $1.1 million in October 2025 after years of stalled negotiations and a threatened condemnation, and as of this year officials still hadn't decided whether to remodel it themselves or sell it to an operator. The Masonic Temple building on Miner Street, purchased in 2022 for $2.1 million, has sat mostly vacant since, even as the mayor describes "intriguing" interest from a potential tenant. And the old Giuseppe's Italian Restaurant building at Graceland and Lee, demolished in May 2026, isn't becoming a restaurant at all. The city plans to leave that corner as open space. The current Giuseppe's, for what it's worth, still operates at a different address on Algonquin Road near Wolf Road.

Put together, the city currently owns or has financed at least five separate downtown properties tied to this strategy: the bank building, the Oliveti's site (via loan rather than ownership), the Leona's building, the Masonic Temple, and a two-story mixed-use building on the 1400 block of Miner Street purchased in June 2026 for a price reported between $1.6 million and $1.9 million depending on the outlet. That's not incidental interest in a few empty storefronts. That's a standing acquisition program.

Why this matters if you already live here

If you've noticed downtown feels like it's perpetually mid-renovation, this is why. The city isn't waiting for a developer to take the risk on a vacant building and hoping it turns into something good. It's taking the risk itself, buying the real estate, absorbing the carrying costs, and then recruiting a specific operator it already trusts, mostly because that operator already delivered once at Lake Opeka. The tradeoff for that certainty is speed. Each new project needs its own city council vote, its own economic incentive agreement, sometimes its own blight designation, before a single wall gets torn out. That's a slower process than a private buyer simply signing a lease, but it's also the reason the city has been able to say no to a country-western bar that never opened in the Oliveti's space back in 2018 and yes to a group with a track record instead.

There's also a longer precedent here worth knowing. The Des Plaines Theatre itself followed a similar path years earlier: the city bought and renovated the venue with financial support from Rivers Casino, reopening it in 2021 after a $6.7 million investment, explicitly framing the theater as a catalyst meant to pull more foot traffic and more business investment downtown. The bank and church conversions aren't a new idea. They're the same idea, run at a larger scale, with a bigger budget, and a longer wait.

For residents, the practical takeaway is patience calibrated to reality. The Dime won't open this year or next. The old Oliveti's building has no confirmed date. But the fact that both projects keep showing up in city council minutes, contractor announcements, and tax filings means the city isn't drifting on these plans. It's executing a strategy it already tested successfully once, on a lake, in a church.

Cornelia Matache pays close attention to projects like these because they shape how a downtown feels to live near, long before they show up in a listing description. If you're curious what a changing block means for your own property, or you're weighing a move into or out of Des Plaines, reach out to Cornelia Matache for a complimentary home valuation and consultation grounded in what's actually happening on the ground here, not just what the portals say.