Cava, Van Leeuwen, Mendocino Farms to join Willis Tower food-hall tenant lineup
Mendocino Farms and Van Leeuwen Ice Cream will make their debut in the Chicago market.
Willis Tower's appraised value has declined to $1.03 billion.
Several new restaurants will be moving into the Willis Tower later this year, adding to the offerings at one of downtown's premier food halls.
Catalog at Willis Tower — a 300,000 square-foot, five-story dining, retail and entertainment offering that opened at the base of the tower in 2022 — will be adding three eateries to its lineup. Cava, a Mediterranean fast-casual restaurant, signed the largest of the three recent leases.
GET TO KNOW YOUR CITY
Find Local Events Near You
Connect with a community of local professionals.
Explore All Events
GET TO KNOW YOUR CITY
Find Local Events Near You
Connect with a community of local professionals.
Explore All Events
'When we designed Catalog, our intention was to curate an array of offerings unique to the Loop neighborhood,' said Morgan Monroe, vice president of leasing for Perform Properties, in a statement. Perform, a Blackstone Inc. company, handles leasing and management for Willis Tower, which is owned by Blackstone.
Cava, which will occupy 3,156 square feet at Chicago's tallest tower, is expected to open in late 2025. Elsewhere in Chicago, the fast-casual restaurant has a location in Wicker Park.
The two other eateries — Mendocino Farms and Van Leeuwen Ice Cream — are making their debut in the Chicago market with the Willis Tower leases.
"Breaking into the Midwest with Chicago as our first stop just feels right," said Ben Van Leeuwen, CEO and co-founder of Van Leeuwen, in a statement.
The New York City ice cream parlor's first Chicago scoop shop will be a 1,712-square-foot space at Catalog, and it's expected to open later this summer.
Mendocino Farms, a California-based sandwich and salad restaurant, will likewise be making its introduction to Chicago with its 3,012-square-foot space, which is expected to open in October. Mendocino Farms' technology at its first Chicago outfit will include its first kiosk-supported concept, providing a stop-and-go option for downtown workers.
Still struggling compared to most other major U.S. cities, foot traffic at Chicago office buildings was down 44.3% in April 2025 compared to April 2019. Office landlords have been looking for new ways to bring tenants back, including through amenity offerings like retail and restaurants.
A recent appraisal of Willis Tower found the value of the iconic tower has substantially declined. Its new appraised value of $1.03 billion, according to Morningstar, is a 42% drop from the tower's last appraisal in 2018, when it was appraised at $1.78 billion during a loan refinancing. Blackstone paid $1.3 billion for Willis Tower in 2015.
In 2022, Blackstone completed a $500 million investment at Willis Tower, which included the addition of Catalog.
Sign up for the Business Journal's free daily newsletter to receive the latest business news impacting Chicago.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
19 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Striim Announces 5.2 - Major Release adds new AI Agents for Predictive Analytics and Vector generation for building novel Gen AI Enterprise Applications with real-time Intelligence
PALO ALTO, Calif., Aug. 13, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- With fast emerging requirements for AI everywhere - Enterprises face new challenges in modernizing their core infrastructure, systems, and applications to adopt an AI-centric future. With an ever-expanding multi-cloud data estate, enterprises are grappling with brittle data pipelines, ETL based batch lag, lack of automated agents, and siloed data architectures that are complex to integrate. Striim's latest product release: Striim 5.2, empowers enterprises to close this gap by adding new endpoint connectors such as Neon serverless Postgres, IBM DB2 z/OS, Microsoft Dynamics and others. It delivers native, real-time, automated AI agents that augment data pipelines without adding operational complexity. This release also adds real-time support for legacy integration from mainframe sources, and data delivery into serverless PostgreSQL and open lakehouse destinations. Striim 5.2 introduces new capabilities to enable AI across three strategic pillars — Enterprise Modernization and Digital Transformation, Data Interoperability, and Real-Time AI — enabling data and analytics/AI teams to accelerate their next generation application roadmap without rewriting it from scratch. Key highlights include: Accelerating Real-time AI: Striim is taking major strides to bring AI directly into real-time data pipelines and applications. Striim recently released the Sherlock and Sentinel AI agents to enable in-flight sensitive data governance. With 5.2., Striim is introducing two new AI agents - Foreseer for anomaly detection and forecasting, and Euclid for real-time vector embedding generation - enabling teams to embed intelligence directly into data streams. Striim is also expanding support to AI-ready databases like Crunchy Data and Neon, built to handle AI agent workloads and in-database AI applications. Driving Enterprise Modernization: Striim now supports reading data in real-time from IBM DB2 on z/OS, making it easier for organizations to modernize their legacy systems. Enterprises can integrate their mainframe data to the cloud and build high-throughput data pipelines that can read data in real-time from a wide array enterprise-grade systems, such as: IBM DB2, Oracle, Snowflake, SQL Server and others, powering analytics, applications, and insights across the business. Powering Digital Transformation: Enterprises are increasingly using Apache Iceberg to provide data interoperability to break data silos, build broad ecosystem adoption, and to future-proof their data architectures. In addition to Delta, Stiim now supports writing data in the Iceberg format to cloud data lakes and to cloud data warehouses such as Snowflake and Google BigQuery. Customers can easily extend their existing data pipelines to take advantage of Iceberg tables without having to rearchitect their applications. Alok Pareek, co-founder and Executive Vice President of Product and Engineering at Striim, emphasized how Striim 5.2 helps enterprises modernize for AI: 'With Striim 5.2, we're giving enterprises a unified, practical, powerful platform that encompasses data integration from legacy systems to AI-driven innovation. Whether you're unlocking mainframe data, embracing open table formats like Apache Iceberg, predicting anomalies, or embedding vectors using AI pipelines, Striim makes it simple. Our unmatched support for hundreds of enterprise-grade connectors—combined with the performance, scalability, and security that global businesses demand—means you can connect anything, stream everything, and power AI everywhere.' ABOUT STRIIM, INC. Striim pioneers real-time intelligence for AI by unifying data across clouds, applications, and databases via a fully managed, SaaS-based platform. Striim's platform, optimized for modern cloud data warehouses, transforms relational and unstructured data into AI-ready insights instantly with advanced analytics and ML frameworks, enabling swift business action. Striim leverages its expertise in real-time data integration, streaming analytics, and database replication, including industry-leading Oracle, PostgreSQL, MongoDB CDC technology, to achieve sub-second latency in processing over 100 billion daily events for ML analytics and proactive decision-making. To learn more, visit Media Contact: Dianna Spring, Vice President of Marketing at StriimPhone: (650) 241-0680 ext. 354Email: press@ Source: Striim, in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Los Angeles Times
20 minutes ago
- Los Angeles Times
Saviynt Names Kevin Spurway Chief Marketing Officer
Veteran CMO brings leadership, cybersecurity and enterprise SaaS experience Los Angeles-based Saviynt, an AI-based identity security and governance solutions company, today announced the hiring of Kevin Spurway as chief marketing officer. Spurway brings more than 20 years of senior-level marketing leadership in enterprise SaaS and software, including as CMO for private, pre-IPO and public U.S. companies. He joins Saviynt from Feedzai, an AI-native fraud and financial crime prevention platform. 'We are pleased to welcome Kevin to the executive team to build upon the marketing foundation we have in place at Saviynt and to help us extend our leadership position in identity security,' said Paul Zolfaghari, president at Saviynt. 'Having worked with Kevin previously, I can attest to his marketing acumen, empathetic leadership style, strong work ethic, focus on pipeline generation and data-driven decision making.' Prior to Feedzai, Spurway was CMO at Similarweb, a SaaS market intelligence company that he joined pre-IPO and helped lead into the U.S. public markets in 2021. Before Similarweb, he spent six years as CMO of low-code application development and process automation company Appian, where he helped drive sustained high growth and was instrumental in the company's success as the top-performing software IPO of 2017. He previously held senior marketing and corporate development positions at PTC and MicroStrategy. Spurway received his B.A. from Dartmouth College and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. 'I'm excited to join Saviynt, a high-growth company with strong AI-based technology and business performance at scale. Saviynt has the opportunity and resources to do great things that create impact for its customers, and I have been particularly impressed by the people at Saviynt and inspired by their talent and energy,' added Spurway. 'I'm looking forward to working with the team to help accelerate adoption of this critical technology, which is a key enabler for businesses looking to securely manage all identities, including surging numbers of AI agents.' Saviynt's AI-powered identity platform manages and governs human and non-human access to all of an organization's applications, data and business processes. Information sourced from Saviynt. Learn more by contacting tila@
Los Angeles Times
20 minutes ago
- Los Angeles Times
Priscilla Presley's legal battle with her former business partner heats up with new $50 million suit
The bitter legal dispute between Priscilla Presley and her former business partner escalated this week. Brigitte Kruse, the founder of Agoura Hills-based GWS Auctions Inc. and her business associate Kevin Fialko on Tuesday filed a new fraud and breach of contract suit against Presley in Los Angeles Superior Court. The suit alleges that Elvis's ex-wife 'undermined their business ventures' and exploited the death of her daughter Lisa Marie Presley in order to gain control over her trust and Graceland. They are seeking more than $50 million in damages. The pair allege they 'invested thousands of hours of their time' and 'millions of dollars into Priscilla' to revive her public image and brand only to have their business relationship severed by Presley. The suit calls Presley, 80, an 'opportunist' and describes a tumultuous relationship between her and her daughter. Presley's attorney Wayne Harman was not available for comment. Kruse first filed a breach of contract suit against Elvis's former wife in Florida two years ago after she cut ties with the joint business venture they formed to to set up several companies to exploit Priscilla Presley's name and image and to bolster Kruse's Elvis memorabilia auctions, through her written 'recollections.' Last year Presley, sued Kruse, who is about half her age, and her business associates for fraud and elder abuse in Los Angeles, claiming she was forced into a 'form of indentured servitude,' leading her into signing away 80% of her income . Kruse denied the claims. While Kruse's Los Angeles suit surfaces many of the earlier claims, it also provides a counter-narrative to several of the allegations contained in Presley's fraud suit, her attorney said. 'The evidence will establish that the real victims here are my clients, who invested millions and years of hard work into revitalizing Priscilla Presley's brand, only to be betrayed and falsely accused once the money was on the table and every personal and business issue had been resolved,' said their attorney Jordan Matthews in a statement. The suit contends that Priscilla 'strong-arm[ed]' Elvis's father Vernon in 1979 on his deathbed into making her co-executor of his son's estate by putting a lien on Graceland and taking over management of the trust. It further alleges that Priscilla 'ultimately wanted to control' her daughter's trust and Graceland. Before Lisa Marie died suddenly in January 2023 at the age of 54, her relationship with her mother was severely strained with Lisa Marie refusing to walk the red carpet or sit with Presley at the Golden Globes to celebrate the multiple nominations of Baz Luhrmann's film 'Elvis,' according to the lawsuit. It was during this time that Lisa Marie was in process of removing her mother as the sole trustee of irrevocable life insurance policy and was 'threatening to sue her.' Kruse claims that she and Fialko, 'worked to keep the family together, ' and with Presley's publicist arranged for the women to appear on the red carpet together and sit next to one another during the award ceremony. Two days later, Lisa Marie suffered cardiac arrest and was rushed to West Hills Hospital. According to the complaint, Presley did not follow her daughter's advanced care directive instructions that stated that she wanted her 'life to be prolonged as long as possible within the limits of generally accepted health care standards.' A copy of the health care directive from 2010 is included as an exhibit to the suit. Following Lisa Marie's death Presley went to court to challenge an amendment that had earlier removed her as a trustee of Lisa Marie's estate, the Promenade Trust and made her granddaughter, the actress Riley Keough, sole trustee. The matter was settled five months later. Kruse alleges that she and Fialko brokered a deal with Keough on Presley's behalf that secured her a $2.4 million payout and 'a seven-figure deal for Priscilla's son, Navarone.' Kruse and her company GWS Auctions also are being sued by the Elvis Presley Estate over a cache of documents from Elvis and Col. Tom Parker that they claim were 'improperly and illegally offered for sale at auction.' An attorney for Kruse has disputed the claim, saying in a statement that when she had informed the Elvis estate of the existence of documents in 2021.
