Yorktown Center owner sues Fresh Market over abandoned grocery store plans
The owner of Yorktown Center is suing The Fresh Market after the boutique grocer abandoned plans to open a new store at the Lombard mall.
YTC Butterfield Owner LLC is seeking more than $15 million from the North Carolina-based grocery store chain in a lawsuit that was filed Monday in DuPage County Circuit Court.
The lawsuit claims that The Fresh Market breached its lease by causing construction delays of the store building because the company failed to provide required construction details on time. The Fresh Market then blamed the mall’s owner for failing to finish the building by the deadline listed in the lease, according to the lawsuit.
YTC blames The Fresh Market for all of the delays, the suit states.
A message left with The Fresh Market seeking comment has not been returned.
Yorktown’s owner demolished a former Brio restaurant on the outskirts of the mall to make way for the new store building and store parking, according to the lawsuit.
The lease began July 1, 2024, and called for the grocery store to be ready by March 31, 2026. It would have been located near townhouses being built at the mall.
According to the lawsuit, The Fresh Market had agreed the store would be built according to prototypical plans for the company’s other locations.
The lawsuit says The Fresh Market did not respond to requested reviews of design plans several times in 2024. In November of that year, the company told YTC to stop construction planning until it gave YTC a final fixture plan, which it expected to submit in early January 2025.
However, the final fixture plan wasn’t submitted until the end of July 2025, according to the lawsuit.
That fixture plan “substantially diverged” from what the lease called for, YTC’s lawsuit says. Then in September 2025, The Fresh Market submitted plans that moved the store’s deli location, added another restroom, removed fixtures and changed the specifications of some walls, the lawsuit says.
In addition, The Fresh Market told YTC it was developing a new prototype. In October 2025, the company said it would give that design to the landlord in early 2026.
Then in March, the grocer notified YTC that it was ending the lease because construction had not started and would not be on time, according to a letter contained in the lawsuit.
YTC claims in the lawsuit that it wouldn’t have razed the Brio building, valued at $4.13 million, if The Fresh Market had not agreed to open at Yorktown. It also says that under the 15-year lease, it expected to receive $10.4 million in rent from The Fresh Market.
Yorktown’s owner is seeking payment of the expected rent, the restaurant building value, plus costs incurred in designing the store and repaving a parking lot.
The Fresh Market has eight stores in Illinois and more than 170 throughout the United States. The company opened a location in Algonquin in March 2025.