Walk the three blocks of Armitage Avenue between the 2000 and 2150 addresses right now and you will pass a construction fence where a sports bar used to be, a gym with its garage doors thrown open, a dinner spot serving West African stew where a Latin American restaurant closed two years ago, and a storefront that houses the office of a newspaper you cannot read on your phone. None of these businesses are competing for the same customer. None of them opened because someone decided this stretch of Armitage should become a destination.
That is the part worth sitting with. Bucktown's other major commercial corridor, Damen Avenue, has spent this year adding restaurants and bars that lean on each other and on the Bloomingdale Trail for foot traffic. A few blocks over, Armitage picked up a gym, a media company's headquarters, and two restaurants at very different altitudes, all within about twelve months. A restaurant row is a pattern. This is not one. It is a street re-filling itself with whatever kind of business happened to need that particular storefront, and the result tells you something about what Armitage actually is right now, which is a working commercial street, not a themed one.
The Restaurant Everyone Already Knows About
The biggest name on the block is also the one still behind plywood. Trattoria Lo So is taking over 2044 W. Armitage Avenue, the space that spent 13 years as the neighborhood sports bar Jack and Ginger's, complete with an outdoor courtyard and terrace. The team behind it is not new to Chicago dining. Sarah Grueneberg, the chef and partner who became a national name as the season 9 runner-up on Top Chef in 2011 and later hosted WTTW's Dishalicious, is opening the project alongside partners Jaime Canete and Rob Mosher, the same trio behind Monteverde in the West Loop.
Grueneberg is stepping into a creative-director role here. The kitchen belongs to Bailey Sullivan, who grew up in La Grange, where her father has run the burger restaurant Goldyburgers for more than 40 years, before earning a culinary degree at Kendall College, interning at the two-Michelin-starred Acadia, and joining Monteverde's kitchen as a line cook in 2016. She worked her way up to executive chef by March 2025, was a finalist on Top Chef's 22nd season, and this year picked up a James Beard Award nomination in the Emerging Chef category.
The construction itself is not a simple buildout. The team is gutting the old Jack and Ginger's and has built a second structure over what used to be the patio, connecting the two under a skylight. Designer Karen Herold of Studio K, who also designed Monteverde's dining room and open pastificio and has prior work at Girl & the Goat and Maple & Ash, is going for a quieter, nook-heavy interior with wood paneling and bentwood bistro chairs. The menu will be Italian, built around meats, fish, and vegetables cooked over a robata-style charcoal grill. Block Club Chicago reported in mid-September that the team is targeting a winter opening, with the timeline stretching into early 2027.
Two Blocks Away, a Gym Kept the Skylight
While that renovation continues, a much quieter transformation already finished a few doors down. Trainer and coach Ashley Stephen and business partner Erik Nelson took over the former Armitage Auto Repair at 2036 W. Armitage Avenue and turned it into Bucktown Assembly, a gym built around strength training, conditioning, group conditioning, and mobility classes. The buildout kept the shop's central skylight and refurbished its brick walls rather than starting from a blank box. Nelson has said as much directly: they looked at sterile boxes elsewhere and picked this one because it had soul. On warmer days the plan is to roll up the old garage doors and let the gym spill into the sidewalk the way the auto shop's bays once did. The gym targeted a July 2026 opening after a three-month buildout.
It is a small detail that matters more than it looks. A former auto repair shop becoming a fitness space is a use change, not a facade change, and it is the kind of adaptive reuse that shows up constantly in older Chicago commercial strips once a use like auto repair stops making economic sense on a block that has otherwise gone residential and retail.
The Restaurant That Replaced a Restaurant
At 2010 W. Armitage Avenue, the turnover was simpler. El Rinconcito Sudamerica, a Latin American restaurant, relocated to Belmont Cragin in early 2025, and restaurant partner Coco Shelton spent roughly a year working through construction delays and permitting to open The Origin, an African fusion restaurant and lounge, in the same space. The restaurant opened a soft launch on April 30, 2026, before a formal grand opening two weeks later. Shelton has described the goal plainly: something different for the neighborhood, priced so people can come back after work rather than saving it for one occasion a year.
A Newspaper You Cannot Read Online
The least conventional opening on the block sits at 2150 W. Armitage Avenue. Ian Fugett, founder of the print-only newspaper the pub, opened a production and events space there in March 2026 that the staff calls the pub house. The publication covers Chicago and Midwest writing and culture, is not on social media, and never posts its issues online. Fugett has said the point is to make readers find the paper in physical space rather than through an algorithm, which is also why he spent a year hand-delivering it to cafes and bookstores before opening a home base of his own. The pub house now hosts collage nights, open mic performances, film screenings, game nights, and a Midwest-themed reading group, run alongside co-editor Ruby Haack and contributor Vinh Wong.
Four Openings, No Pattern, and That Is the Point
Line up the four addresses and you get a fine-dining Italian restaurant from a Top Chef alum, a strength and conditioning gym in a converted auto shop, a casual African fusion lounge, and the headquarters of a newspaper that refuses to exist online. They opened within roughly a year of each other, on the same short stretch of the same street, and share almost nothing except the block.
That is a different story than the one playing out on Damen, where new restaurants and bars are clustering around fixed anchors like the Bloomingdale Trail access point and the redeveloped Vienna Beef property, each one benefiting from the foot traffic the others generate. Armitage's openings are not stacking on each other. Bucktown Assembly does not need The Origin's dinner crowd to survive, and the pub house was never counting on Trattoria Lo So's reservation list. Each business filled a specific gap that had nothing to do with what opened next door.
For anyone who already lives along this stretch, that matters more than a roundup of new restaurants would. It means the corridor is not turning into a single-purpose destination you visit for one reason and leave. It is turning into the kind of street where you might lift weights on a Tuesday morning, pick up the pub's latest print run on a Thursday, and have to decide, sometime after this winter, whether tonight is a Trattoria Lo So kind of night or an Origin kind of night. Read more about the neighborhood these blocks sit inside on our Bucktown neighborhood page, and see how the Damen corridor's own wave of openings compares in our earlier walk down Damen this summer.
None of this required rezoning or a redevelopment plan. An auto shop became a gym. A sports bar became a fine-dining project two years in the making. A vacant restaurant space became a different restaurant. A quiet storefront became a newsroom. That is what a commercial street does when it still has room to absorb four different kinds of businesses at once, and it is worth watching what Armitage looks like once the Trattoria Lo So scaffolding finally comes down.
Curious what a corridor like this means for the buildings around it, from what an old auto shop's zoning allows to what a gut renovation like Trattoria Lo So's actually costs? That is the kind of construction-first read Marcello Navarro brings to every Bucktown conversation. Reach out anytime you want a second opinion grounded in what these buildings can actually become.
