Walk down Washington Street this month and you'll count at least four storefronts that didn't exist a year ago. A steakhouse where a seafood restaurant used to be. A tavern with rooms named after former mayors. A three-floor concept a few blocks over on Jefferson. Each one gets its own local news segment, its own grand-opening night, its own line of regulars discovering it for the first time. Taken together, they read like proof that downtown Naperville's restaurant scene is expanding in every direction at once.
It isn't, quite. Trace the ownership on three of those four storefronts and you land on the same name.
One Group, Six Concepts, Two Blocks
Will Cullen opened his first restaurant, Empire Burgers + Brew, at 48 W. Chicago Ave. in 2016. It became downtown's late-night anchor, known for its retractable rooftop deck overlooking the DuPage River, one of the only setups of its kind in the area. Cullen has since expanded Empire to a second location in Lombard and added Northcott Liquorette at 40 W. Chicago Ave., the sports bar concept Hizemans, and The George American Tavern at 245 S. Washington St. to his downtown Naperville footprint. When The Belmont American Steakhouse opened at 35 S. Washington St. this past summer, local coverage identified it as the sixth concept under Cullen's Empire Restaurant Group.
The Belmont is the one worth slowing down on, because of where it landed. That address belonged to Catch 35, a seafood restaurant that had operated at the Washington Street entrance to downtown for 21 years before closing in the summer of 2025. When Cullen's group took the space, they gutted the front of house and built something deliberately old-fashioned: reservation-only tables, a walk-in bar, a 42-ounce tomahawk steak sourced from Blackwell Farms in Kentucky and Chatel Farms in Georgia, and an executive chef, Zac Rogers, who co-founded the concept alongside Cullen and partner Dave Miller. Miller and Cullen also built The George together, naming its rooms and its signature Badge 13 Burger after George Pradel, Naperville's mayor for two decades, and working with the Naperville Historical Society to trace other local Georges worth honoring, including George Knoch, for whom Knoch Park is named.
Here's the shape of downtown's newest dining row, mapped by who actually signs the lease:
| Restaurant | Address | Behind It | Space's Prior Life |
|---|---|---|---|
| Empire Burgers + Brew | 48 W. Chicago Ave. | Empire Restaurant Group (Cullen), opened 2016 | flagship build-out |
| Northcott Liquorette | 40 W. Chicago Ave. | Empire Restaurant Group | — |
| The George American Tavern | 245 S. Washington St. | Empire Restaurant Group (Cullen, Miller) | new concept, opened earlier in 2026 |
| The Belmont American Steakhouse | 35 S. Washington St. | Empire Restaurant Group (Cullen, Miller, Chef Zac Rogers) | former Catch 35, closed 2025 after 21 years |
| Lennon's | 16 W. Jefferson Ave. | Jeremy Stolberg, independent | former Craftsman / Barrel House / AltaVida |
Four of downtown's most talked-about recent openings share an ownership group. That doesn't make them interchangeable. Empire is a late-night burger and rooftop crowd. The George leans into local history and a family-friendly patio. The Belmont is reservation-driven and deliberately slower, built to feel, as Cullen has described it, like a return to an era when a steak dinner wasn't rushed. But if you've been reading each opening as an independent sign of a booming, wide-open restaurant market, the pattern says something different: one operator with a proven build-out playbook is the one absorbing downtown's highest-profile vacancies, and doing it well enough that each new concept gets treated as news all over again.
What Lennon's Proves by Being the Exception
The fifth entry in that table matters precisely because it breaks the pattern. Lennon's opened in July 2025 at 16 W. Jefferson Ave., in a space that had cycled through three previous concepts, The Craftsman, Barrel House, and AltaVida, before owner Jeremy Stolberg took it over and built three distinct dining floors under one roof. Stolberg's stated goal was the opposite of a fast-casual turn-and-burn: he wanted a place where people would linger rather than clear the table for the next reservation.
Lennon's is proof that a genuinely new, independently owned concept can still land one of downtown's best addresses and succeed. It's also the exception that makes the rule visible. When a downtown storefront turns over, the odds increasingly favor an operator who already has the capital, the contractor relationships, and the brand recognition to move fast, which in practice has meant Cullen's group more often than not on the higher-profile Washington Street corridor.
The Retail Domino Right Next to It
The consolidation pattern isn't confined to restaurants. In January, Eddie Bauer closed its downtown Naperville location as part of a wave of store closures the retailer reported nationally. Katie Wood, executive director of the Downtown Naperville Alliance, confirmed the space had already been leased before the doors even shut, with an announcement on the new tenant still pending. The speed of that backfill says something about how the Alliance manages turnover on its most visible blocks: gaps don't sit empty and unclaimed for long, because the group overseeing downtown's leasing pipeline treats a closure as the start of the next deal, not a loss to absorb.
Why the Timing Actually Matters This Month
None of this would carry much weight if it weren't about to collide with the calendar. The 41st annual Riverwalk Fine Art Fair runs September 19-20, 2026, drawing more than 100 juried artists and an estimated 40,000 visitors along the Riverwalk and Jackson Avenue, free to attend and hosted by the Naperville Art League. That footprint runs directly past the same stretch of Washington and Jefferson where four of the five restaurants above now sit.
For a resident, that overlap is the practical takeaway. The Belmont books tables by reservation, with only bar seats open to walk-ins, which means fair weekend is not the night to show up hoping for a table without planning ahead. The George's patio and Empire's rooftop will be competing for the same overflow crowd once the fair lets out. Lennon's three floors give it more flexible capacity than most of the newer openings, which may make it the more forgiving option if you're deciding late. None of that is guesswork. It's simply what happens when a single ownership group controls several of the highest-demand addresses on the exact blocks 40,000 visitors are about to walk through.
Knowing who actually owns what downtown doesn't change what you order. It changes how you read the next headline about a "new" restaurant opening two blocks from the last one, and it tells you which reservations to make before the fair crowd figures out the same map.
If you're the kind of Naperville resident who tracks these shifts for their own sake, that same instinct for reading a neighborhood closely is exactly what the Niki Rocco Group brings to a home search or a listing strategy in this market. When the time comes, request a free home valuation and put that same local read to work for you.
