The owners of Common Good Cocktail House to open restaurant in downtown Wheaton
Mike Melazzo and Chad Hauge make art in a glass at Common Good, their craft cocktail lounge in Glen Ellyn.
The bar's greatest-hit menu describes the Sipping Scholar, a blend of bourbon, Madeira wine, German spice liqueur and housemade bitters, as a booze-forward tribute to “hardworking professors at dry colleges.”
Melazzo grew up in Glen Ellyn and Wheaton, a dry city for more than 50 years after Prohibition ended. His business partner, Hauge, graduated from the “ever-dry” Wheaton College.
The convivial Common Good made them the toast of the Western suburbs. Melazzo, Hauge and his wife, Alicia, are now shaking things up in Wheaton. Their latest concept is Maypole, a 100-seat restaurant and bar set to open downtown.
Melazzo and Hauge honed their craft as beverage directors of Mott St. and Longman & Eagle in Chicago's Wicker Park and Logan Square neighborhoods. They started Common Good in 2018, introducing suburbanites to their use of bar gadgets and boundary-pushing, seasonal ingredients.
In a stirred-not-shaken riff on the Vesper, Melazzo infused gin with tart cranberry and lemon grass, balancing the sweetness with herbaceous dry vermouth, to create the “Glen Ellyn Bond Girl” for the bar's 2021 winter menu.
The new restaurant in Wheaton also will showcase “high-end technique,” Melazzo said.
“When we came back out here to open Common Good about five years ago, one of my dreams was to open a restaurant and have a real world-class chef from our time in the city,” said Melazzo, who went to Wheaton Academy.
Chef Bridget Vanaman, who also has experience at Mott St., will helm Maypole. The restaurant will take over the Front Street space formerly occupied by Emmett's Brewing Co. and The Bank in one of the oldest buildings in downtown Wheaton.
“We reached out to chef and said the only way we'll do a restaurant is if we have the right leader involved and that was her,” Melazzo recently told Wheaton liquor commissioners. “And we reached out and we were blown away when she said, ‘I would love to come to the suburbs. I would love to come to Wheaton and do a restaurant for you guys.'”
Melazzo is one of the creative minds behind Subourbon, a members-only craft cocktail lounge filling the lower-level space at the same Front Street address.
“It is a really beautiful building. It's a historic building,” he said.
The Maypole team has experience with historic renovation. Common Good brought new life to a more-than-century-old building the bar shares with Sign of the Whale Antiques, just across the street from the Glen Ellyn Metra station.
An upholstered bench provides communal seating and fosters conversation. With a dash of improvisation, bartenders build layers of flavor, tailoring drinks for both the adventurous and the timid.
“We're going to try to craft the design of every cocktail as beautifully as we possibly can, and we really do want people, like our mission statement says, to have the best cocktails that they've ever tasted,” Hauge said in a Daily Herald interview before Common Good opened its doors.
Maypole will serve “international flavors through the lens of classic American comfort food,” Melazzo said, offering the example of kimchi mac and cheese.
“The food is the main focus and the vision for the space,” Melazzo said.
The city council has awarded a liquor license to the restaurant.