Evanston Restaurants: Why the Fifth Ward Deserves a Detour

If you have spent 2026 tracking Evanston's restaurant news the way most residents do, by scrolling past headlines about downtown, you have a pretty good mental map by now. Burl opened near Central Street in late January. A cafe filled a longstanding breakfast gap inside the Hilton Orrington in April. A Korean sandwich shop took over the old Edzo's space on Sherman Avenue in March. And in July, two James Beard Award winners announced they were bringing a new restaurant to Bookman's Alley.

That map is accurate, and another major restaurant opening belongs in Evanston's 2026 roundup: Soul & Smoke's flagship opened September 1 on Payne Street, in the Fifth Ward, inside a converted century-old barn that used to belong to one of the largest Black-owned transportation companies in the country.

Other Evanston Restaurant Openings This Year

Downtown saw several restaurant openings this year. Burl, the 75-seat, wood-fired restaurant at 2545 Prairie Avenue from Tom Carlin and Rachel Canfora-Carlin, opened January 30 and built its menu around a rule that at least 80 percent of ingredients come from the local food network. In April, Land & Lake Cafe opened inside the Hilton Orrington as the hotel's third dining concept, aimed at filling a straightforward gap: nobody had a proper breakfast-and-coffee spot in that stretch of downtown. In March, Newyolk Town took over the former Edzo's Burger space on the 1600 block of Sherman with a Korean street food menu built almost entirely around eggs.

Beverly Kim and Johnny Clark are the James Beard Award-winning couple behind Parachute HiFi and Anelya. In April, reporting suggested their new project in Bookman's Alley, called Alleyway Grill, would open by the end of 2026. By the time the couple made it official in July, the target had shifted to early 2027. As of this month, it still hasn't opened.

Here's the lineup as it actually stands:

The projects are at different stages: Soul & Smoke has opened, while Alleyway Grill is targeting early 2027.

Soul & Smoke's Fifth Ward Opening

D'Andre Carter and Heather Bublick bought the building at 1601 Payne Street in 2020, right before the pandemic turned their catering side hustle into a business that could no longer fit in a takeout window. The building itself carries weight before anyone plates a rib. It started as a barn and horse stable, later became a dairy, and eventually served as a repair shop for the Robinson Bus Company, one of the largest Black-owned transportation businesses in the country and a major Evanston employer in its day. When the founder's daughter eventually sold that building, she sold it to Carter and Bublick, extending a line of Black-owned business on the same footprint rather than closing it out.

The renovation that followed took longer than anyone planned. Evanston's City Council approved $650,000 in TIF funding for the project back in 2022, a decision that drew its own scrutiny at the time. But that public money covered roughly a fifth of what turned into a nearly $3 million buildout of the 5,500-square-foot space, funded mostly by Carter and Bublick themselves rather than outside investors. They had originally hoped to open by late summer of 2025. Construction delays pushed the date more than a year past that target.

Bublick told Evanston Now, "You know, at first, when we first set the date, I still didn't really believe it."

The wait ended on a Tuesday. Soul & Smoke's flagship opened September 1 with expanded dinner service, a full bar, and table service that the original counter-service, picnic-table version of the restaurant never had.

What Actually Got Built on Payne Street

As WTTW reported, the menu kept the food that built the brand's reputation, brisket, pulled pork, St. Louis-style ribs, smoked over hours in the open kitchen's hulking smokers, and added a full dinner menu around it: housemade pasta, oysters with green tomato chow chow, a halibut collar, and an oxtail "cigar" rolled in collard greens and finished with a sesame-seed "ash" as a callback to Carter's time at Moto. Bublick, a sommelier, built the wine list around BIPOC and woman-owned producers, paired with rum punch and other cocktails.

The art inside tells the neighborhood's story as directly as the menu tells the restaurant's. A large Hebru Brantley Flyboy mural fills one wall, with hearts hidden in a bottom corner. Street artist JC Rivera's two-wall "Bear Champ" mural works in an Evanston lighthouse and a small school bus, direct nods to place. Haitian artist Guy Philoche, based in Harlem, contributed a piece of a young Black boy on a gold background reading "Do You See Us Now." Northwestern graduate Dwight White painted the restaurant's original barn door with a mural referencing the building's start as a dairy a century ago. Outside, a mural by Bianca Pastel marks the community fridge and pantry that sits by the front door, which reopened in fall 2025.

The night the restaurant threw its opening party also happened to be the night the neighborhood's Foster School held its own grand reopening after decades of community advocacy. Bublick has called it part of a broader rebirth for the Fifth Ward, and the calendar cooperated in a way no marketing plan could have arranged.

What Changes for Your Fall Routine

Downtown's own draw just went quiet for the season. Downtown Evanston's Downtown Summer Sounds concert series, now in its third year, ran nine Thursday evenings at Fountain Square from July 9 through September 3, closing out with the Suite Mollie Band. That means the free live music and Thursday Night Market that have organized a lot of downtown Thursdays this summer are done until next year.

Soul & Smoke, meanwhile, was one of the food trucks parked at those same Fountain Square concerts all summer, feeding a downtown crowd while its own permanent home took shape half a mile up Green Bay Road from Hecky's, the neighborhood's other long-running barbecue landmark. The truck is still part of the rotation for catering and events. The difference now is that there's a full sit-down restaurant behind it that doesn't take a season off.

If your fall routine has been built around downtown because that's where the news has been, the Fifth Ward now has an anchor of its own, open every day, with a bar, a wine list, and a dining room that took six years and nearly $3 million to build. The dining room gives Evanston another place to spend a fall evening.

Stories like this one are exactly why we spend as much time in Evanston's neighborhoods as we do in its listings. If you're weighing a move within town, or just want a team that actually knows which blocks are changing and why, Abbie Homes Group is here for the conversation whenever you're ready to have it.