15-05-2025
Foxtrot Market to open first brand-new store since all stores shut down last year
Just over a year after Foxtrot Café & Market closed all its stores abruptly in the middle of a weekday, the upscale corner store chain — under the direction of its original co-founder — is set on Thursday to open its first brand-new location since that event.
The new Foxtrot location will open Thursday at 935 W. Webster Ave. — at the southwest corner of the intersection with Bissell Street. The building was formerly home to the State Restaurant, and was recently redeveloped with a new structure with four residential units above the first-floor retail space.
The location is close to DePaul University, and only a couple of blocks from the former Foxtrot location at 900 W. Armitage Ave.
The new Webster Avenue location joins six others that have reopened since all the Foxtrot stores closed in April 2024 — at 1722 W. Division St. and 1576 N. Milwaukee Ave. in Wicker Park, 23 W. Maple St. in the Gold Coast, 1562 N. Wells St. in Old Town, 171 N. Green St. in Fulton Market, and 401 N. Wells St. in River North. There are also two locations in Dallas.
Reopening the old Lincoln Park store in the same location was not an option, but Foxtrot was able to find a new spot there.
"Obviously, the past year has been a lot, and we're really focused on, you know, reopening existing in neighborhoods that we knew well, but Lincoln Park was our second store ever," said Foxtrot chairman and cofounder Mike LaVitola. "Unfortunately, it was one of the ones that we didn't get back sort of as everything happened last year, and this opportunity popped up where it was, you know, total classic Foxtrot location."
The new Webster Avenue store features a 25-seat patio.
The opportunity for a new Foxtrot location on Webster Avenue first came last summer, and LaVitola said the company saw it as an opportunity to show a new path forward with a brand-new store.
Reviving the Foxtrot brand after a crisis
About 13 months ago, Foxtrot's brand took a serious drubbing. On Tuesday, April 23, 2024, Foxtrot — under different ownership at the time — closed all 33 of its stores in Chicago, Texas, and the Washington, D.C. area, before later filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy.
The closures came only six months after Foxtrot merged with Dom's Kitchen & Market under then-parent company Outfox Hospitality. Dom's Kitchen & Market also closed all its stores abruptly the same day.
Some employees said they found out the stores had closed upon coming to work on Tuesday, April 23, 2024. Two young women working at a Foxtrot at Broadway and Diversey Parkway posted a TikTok video saying they found out the company was shutting down and they were losing their jobs in the middle of their shift.
They said customers were still inside at the time and were all asked to leave, and the store promptly went out of business — with a handwritten sign reading, "Closed for good."
Combined, nearly 350 people who had worked at Foxtrot and Dom's lost their jobs in Illinois, with hundreds more also losing their jobs at Foxtrot locations across the country.
Former Outfox Hospitality employees have filed a federal lawsuit accusing them of violating state and federal worker protection laws by closing stores and laying off staff without warning.
Later in 2024, Foxtrot returned with a new ownership group that included LaVitola, and has been reopening stores and restoring the brand. By August, the company had brought back 45 former vendors that worked with Foxtrot — a list that an Eater article at the time said included Chicago brands such as Metric Coffee, the All Together Now wine shop and cheese counter, and Do-Rite Donuts, among others.
Bringing together the products of local vendors from around the city at a local corner store was at the heart of Foxtrot from the beginning, LaVitola said.
"The important thing for kind of me and the team coming back were, do our local vendors want to work for us again? That's at the heart of why I started the company in the first place was I was obsessed with all this stuff happening around the city, and you know, asking why I couldn't get it in my local neighborhood, right?" he said. "Like you had these amazing breweries, and coffee roasters, and bakers — all this cool stuff happening — and on the main corner of every neighborhood I lived in was just kind of like a generic convenience store that was offering none of that stuff."
LaVitola said Foxtrot had moved away from that mission before the meltdown, and his mission since returning has been both bringing back the unique vendors and bringing Foxtrot's teams back to serve the neighborhoods where it had thrived.
"Fortunately, both of those have happened," he said, "and you know, I think we've had our heads down, and have been building and been building, and just really sort of like focused on those two things, and this is really the first moment where we can say: 'This is something new. This is something that we're really proud of.'"
Unfortunately, despite some successful reopenings, there were other locations besides the old Lincoln Park location on that the revived Foxtrot could not get back.
The location at Diversey and Broadway where the employees shot the TikTok video the day all the stores closed is one location where Foxtrot could not return. The space was left seemingly abandoned with Foxtrot furniture and trappings inside as months went on last year. It sits across the street from a shuttered Walgreens drugstore that closed all the way back in 2019 and has been vacant ever since.
"When we started last summer reviving the brand, it was sort of one-on-one conversations with each individual landlord, and so as of now, we like have locations that we have back. That one in Lakeview is a great example. I would love to reopen that location," he said. "The landlord has moved on, and so we'll find something else great in that neighborhood."
LaVitola added that many store managers at the revived Foxtrot stores had worked for "Foxtrot 1.0" previously, and know the business and training processes well.
Free coffee Thursday morning at new Lincoln Park store
At the new Webster Avenue store, Foxtrot is offering free coffee from 6 a.m. to 11 a.m. Thursday with no purchase necessary, and anyone making a purchase of $50 or more will receive a free Lincoln Park tote.
Foxtrot also noted that it is expanding its curated café menu with "bigger, bolder new breakfast tacos" on locally made tortillas, as well as house-made smoothies with premium raw fruits and vegetables, and "an even bigger selection of irresistible, globally inspired gummies," the company announced in a news release.
The Webster Avenue store will also feature an expanded café menu with exclusive coffee blends and seasonal favorites such as the Cookie Top Latte and the Toasted Coconut Matcha Latte, the company said. The new store will further feature offerings from new artisans and packaged goods brands.
