The corner space at 18 W. Busse Avenue sat empty for seven years. Tokens and Tankards closed there in April 2017, and after that, nothing. No new tenant, no soft reopening, no temporary pop-up. Just a dark storefront a block off Northwest Highway while three other restaurants opened and closed around it. Village trustees didn't approve a liquor license for that address again until January 2024, and even then it took months of buildout before Mount Prospect Public House opened its doors.
That single vacancy helps illustrate how downtown Mount Prospect has changed. When CoCo & Maple opened in the new HQ Residences building, Mayor Paul Hoefert was quoted by WhatNow as calling it the "15th eating opportunity in downtown Mount Prospect" and a "super exciting" milestone. The number is accurate: downtown added a fifteenth restaurant while also filling three gaps in the options available throughout the day: no late-night anchor, no true upscale option, and only one daytime cafe. All three gaps closed within about two years of each other, and the fall calendar downtown runs on right now, from the farmers market to Halloween, is the first version of that calendar with all three pieces in place.
The seven-year gap on Busse Avenue
Mount Prospect Public House is the loudest of the three additions, and it's built for exactly the role the old space couldn't fill while it sat empty. Owners Nick Apostolopoulos, who also runs the Stray Hen Cafe in Elmhurst, and Sam Vardalos, who spent 30 years in banking before this, took the name literally. Vardalos has said they chose Mount Prospect Public House specifically to welcome the public into the building. At 5,000 square feet, it's a bar, restaurant and private event venue with pool tables, dart boards, gaming machines and room for up to 220 guests at private functions. Current hours put it open until 1 a.m. Wednesday and Thursday and 2 a.m. Friday and Saturday, with a standing Wednesday trivia night.
That matters because downtown Mount Prospect didn't have a comparable late-night option before this. Cafes and lunch spots close by early evening. Dinner restaurants wind down by 9 or 10. A corner bar with pool tables and a 2 a.m. Saturday close is a different kind of anchor, and for seven years the space built for exactly that use sat dark.
What filled in around it
While Public House was still working through its liquor license, Big Fish Hospitality was building out a different kind of gap two blocks away. The Prospect opened at 20 W. Northwest Highway, on the ground floor of the 20West apartment building developed by Wingspan Development Group and designed by Barker/Nestor Architects. The two-story restaurant seats 90 to 100 people on the first floor and another 50 to 75 upstairs, with a full bar on each level and a second-floor space built for private events and al fresco dining.
The kitchen is led by chef Mauro Berruti, who came from Gibson's Italia, Bazaar Meat Chicago and Chicago Cut Steakhouse, paired with general manager Garrett Supples, whose background runs through Chicago Diner, Frontier, Ina Mae Tavern and Packaged Goods. Between them they brought more than 30 years of Chicago fine-dining experience to a building that didn't exist a few years ago. Before The Prospect, downtown Mount Prospect had casual and mid-range dining. It didn't have a two-floor restaurant with that kind of culinary pedigree behind the pass.
The third piece is smaller in square footage but not in signal. CoCo & Maple, at 130 E. Northwest Highway inside the new HQ Residences building, is the second location for the Brown family, who opened CoCo & Blu in Arlington Heights back in 2019. Michael, Denise and Nate Brown put roughly $880,547 into the Mount Prospect buildout, and the village kicked in a $250,000 redevelopment incentive to help it along, tied to a completion timeline that ran through the end of 2025. It opened as a sister cafe with the same coffee-cocktails-and-conversation format as the original, just with higher ceilings and a more spacious, less crowded feel according to early reviews. It gave downtown a second real daytime option instead of one cafe absorbing all the morning and midday traffic.
Here's what those three addresses looked like before and after:
| Address | Before | Now opens as | What it adds |
|---|---|---|---|
| 18 W. Busse Ave | Vacant since April 2017 (formerly Tokens and Tankards) | Mount Prospect Public House | Late-night bar and event space, open past midnight Wednesday through Saturday |
| 20 W. Northwest Hwy | New construction, ground floor of 20West | The Prospect | Two-story upscale dining from a chef and GM with Chicago fine-dining backgrounds |
| 130 E. Northwest Hwy | New construction, HQ Residences | CoCo & Maple | A second daytime cafe, sister location to Arlington Heights' CoCo & Blu |
Two of the three additions came from new construction. Only one came from filling a vacancy, but it's the vacancy that had been open the longest and the one that closes the biggest functional gap in the downtown day.
Why this is showing up on the fall calendar right now
The village's fall calendar hasn't changed shape. The Downtown Merchants Association still runs its Oktoberfest & Fall Festival at the intersection of Emerson Street and Busse Avenue every third weekend in September, and this year's edition ran Friday and Saturday, September 18 and 19, with the band Paloma playing German standards on Friday night and a free, family-focused Fall Festival taking over Saturday. That event wrapped about two weeks ago.
What's different is what surrounds it now. The Lions Club Farmers Market runs every Sunday from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. through October 25 at the West Metra commuter lot, at the corner of Northwest Highway and Main Street, and for the first time a Sunday market trip can end with a sit-down brunch two blocks away at CoCo & Maple instead of just a coffee to go. Downtown Trick-or-Treat is set for Wednesday, October 28, from 4 to 6 p.m., with kids working storefronts for candy while parents have an actual dinner option waiting once the trick-or-treating ends, instead of driving somewhere else for the evening.
Over the summer, that same density showed up in the 56 Music Fix weekend, when regional bands took over multiple downtown bars and restaurants at once, from Emerson's Ale House to Station 34 to Mrs. P & Me, turning a few blocks of Northwest Highway into a walkable, multi-venue show. That kind of event depends on having enough anchors within a few blocks of each other to make walking between them worth it. Three years ago, one of those anchors was a dark storefront.
None of this changes what downtown Mount Prospect is. It changes what a day there can look like without leaving. A morning at the farmers market, lunch or coffee at CoCo & Maple, an early dinner at The Prospect for something with more polish, or a later night at Public House for trivia and a beer. That rotation didn't exist as recently as 2023, when one of its three pieces was still boarded up.
If you're weighing what daily life actually feels like in a neighborhood like this, that kind of detail tends to matter more than a listing photo ever could. If you're curious what a home in downtown Mount Prospect's walking radius is worth given how much has filled in around it, C Starr Team can walk you through it.
