Will Yard House raise a glass in Rosemont? Village sets Friday deadline to come to a deal

Rosemont officials have set a Friday deadline for a developer and national restaurant operator to agree to a deal that would get shovels in the ground for a Yard House bar/restaurant.

If not, Mayor Brad Stephens said, he’ll look elsewhere to fill the space in The Pearl District.

“This has gone on for 18 months,” he said. “If we can’t get this across the finish line by Friday, we’ll move to a different restaurant group.”

Village officials have been eager to get a restaurant open on the northeast corner of Berwyn Avenue and Pearl Street for the foot traffic it could provide to the neighboring EXP immersive art venue, which opened Sept. 26.

Discussions with proprietors of Yard House started and stopped — then started again — after a deal for a previously announced, automobile-inspired Ford’s Garage restaurant fell through in 2024.

The village earlier this year inked a tentative redevelopment agreement with S/Point Ventures, the builder and developer of properties for Yard House operator Darden Restaurants, which also owns sit-down restaurant brands Olive Garden, LongHorn Steakhouse, Ruth’s Chris Steak House and The Capital Grille.

The agreement calls for the village to give the developer the publicly owned land, and the developer to build the one-story, 9,000-square-foot restaurant from the ground up.

But the property — once home to series of light industrial buildings the village bought and demolished years ago — has long been plagued by soil compaction issues.

Stephens said the village will clean up the site and secure a no further remediation letter from the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency by March 2026.

If village officials receive a copy of the lease between S/Point and Darden, they can then convey the land to the developer and issue a permit for construction to begin as soon as June, Stephens said.

The village board on Monday agreed to spend $886,000 on underground foundation work before laying a concrete slab for the developer to build on. Trustees also agreed to spend $627,000 for additional plumbing and conduit work, which will be reimbursed by the developer.

But Stephens said he won’t sign any of the documents until all the parties are on the same page.

The Rosemont Yard House would be the fifth in the Chicago suburbs, following the opening of a location in June near Hawthorn mall in Vernon Hills and scheduled Nov. 24 opening of an eatery at Fox Valley Mall in Naperville. Other locations are in Glenview and Lombard.