Celebrated Chicago restaurant avec plans to open Highwood location

A popular Chicago restaurant is opening a new location in Highwood this spring. 

The Mediterranean restaurant avec, known for its flagship West Loop location that opened in 2003 before expanding to River North in 2021, will expand once again into the site of a former boxing gym in Highwood, the restaurant group One Off Hospitality announced in September. 

Construction for the restaurant’s “warm, minimalist environment” that will offer a total of 115 seats across approximately 5,000 square feet of dining room and bar area space is anticipated to begin in November and complete in April 2026, a news release from One Off Hospitality says.

Avec’s “rustic menu of Mediterranean- and Midwestern-inspired” food and wine won it a James Beard Award for best chef in 2010, a Restaurant of the Year Jean Banchet Award in 2025 and was featured on The New York Times’ recent “25 Best Restaurants in Chicago Right Now.”

The West Loop avec location was also spotlighted on “The Bear,” a popular FX television series about Chicago cuisine and restaurants. The Highwood avec is slated to open at 250 Waukegan Ave., the former site of the Warehouse Boxing Gym that relocated to Highland Park.

“Chicago’s vibrant North Shore has always been a community we admire,” said Donnie Madia, a partner with One Off Hospitality, in the news release announcing the new restaurant.  

“We’ve spent time engaging directly with residents, asking what they hoped to see from One Off Hospitality, and the overwhelming response was a desire for avec. We’re proud to bring one of our most enduring restaurants to such a special neighborhood,” Madia said. 

Madia and other representatives from avec were at the site of the future restaurant in downtown Highwood on Sept. 16 catering the launch party of the local chamber of commerce’s 7th Annual Design Week, a four-day showcase of local artists and design firms. 

There, Madia presented the preliminary architectural layout for the new restaurant and a mood board of the restaurant’s aesthetic, said Jennifur Condon, executive director of the Highwood Chamber of Commerce. 

“It will ratchet up the level of restaurants that you can visit in Highwood,” Condon said, referencing the city’s reputation for its numerous eateries and bars. 

“The best thing about Highwood is, if you happen to be there and you don’t have a reservation, you go to Disotto for instance and they don’t have a table, there’s all these other restaurants at the same tier that you can go to without having to go down to the city,” Condon said. “We’re so very lucky.”

Online Lake County property tax records show that Big Star Highwood purchased the parcel of land 250 Waukegan Ave. sits on for $575,000 in July 2023.

Notably, the Highwood avec will carry on a tradition its other locations provide where individuals can order Thanksgiving meals to-go each November, Condon said. 

The restaurant will be designed “in collaboration with Thomas Schlesser, the visionary” who designed the unique dining space of the first avec, One Off Hospitality said. Schlesser also designed the Michelin-starred One Off Hospitality restaurant Blackbird, which closed in 2020. 

One Off Hospitality reportedly has earned 12 total James Beard Foundation Awards of Excellence as it has managed a number of other Chicago area restaurants, including The Violent Hour, Big Star, The Publican, Publican Quality Bread Oak Park and Dove’s Luncheonette.

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