Oak Brook has not had a full-service grocery store since the early 1970s, when the Jewel Food Store that opened alongside Sears and Marshall Field's at Oakbrook Center in 1962 shut its doors. No supermarket has taken its place in the more than fifty years since. What has taken its place, again and again, is the mall itself.
That is not a coincidence of retail economics. It is the pattern that explains almost everything happening in Oak Brook's commercial life this year, from a Michelin-adjacent restaurant's first expansion in seventeen years to a Japanese apparel giant's newest Chicago-area flagship to a proposal now working its way through Village Hall that could finally close the gap.
The Fifty-Year Gap
When Oakbrook Center opened in 1962, it came stocked with the basics: Sears, Marshall Field's, and a Jewel Food Store, the kind of anchor lineup meant to make a shopping center function like a town center. The Jewel didn't last. Once it closed in the early 1970s, Oak Brook never got a replacement supermarket, and it has spent the decades since as one of the few communities in the Chicago area whose commercial identity runs entirely through a shopping mall rather than a Main Street or a grocery-anchored strip.
That absence shaped everything that followed. Instead of a downtown growing up around a supermarket, DuPage County residents watched Oakbrook Center itself keep absorbing the growth: a 1981-82 expansion that doubled the center's footprint, Nordstrom arriving in 1990, Neiman Marcus joining the anchor lineup, a 172-room Le Méridien hotel opening in 2014, and a remodeled AMC Theatres wing with a food hall called The District arriving in 2016. Every cycle of investment landed at the same address.
What Grew Instead
The 2026 additions follow the same script, just with sharper names attached.
The Purple Pig, the Michelin Bib Gourmand restaurant that has anchored Chicago's Magnificent Mile since 2009, opened its first-ever second location at Oakbrook Center in early March. Chef Tony Mantuano and co-owner Marianna Bannos took over an 11,000-plus-square-foot former furniture showroom near Macy's, building a full restaurant, a bar with a live hearth and Josper oven, and a Purple Pig Marketplace selling grab-and-go pizza, gelato, and pastries. For Bannos, who was born in Oak Brook, it was framed as a homecoming rather than an expansion. The restaurant's opening drew coverage from the Daily Herald, which noted the space includes two private dining areas and a 60-seat patio that opened in May.
Two months later, UNIQLO opened its third Chicago-area store, a two-level location at Oakbrook Center that debuted May 15 with a three-day grand opening built around Taiko drum performances, custom tote bags designed by artist JC Rivera, and treats from Garrett Popcorn and Stan's Donuts. UNIQLO USA CEO Fuminori Adachi described the company's approach to picking store locations directly:
"Our strategy is about thoughtful growth, opening the right stores in the right places."
Oak Brook made that list alongside a reopened Michigan Avenue flagship, according to reporting from NBC Chicago.
Blue Bottle Coffee moved in the same season, and STK Steakhouse, sitting just across 22nd Street from the mall, continues to draw shoppers looking for dinner and drinks after a day at Oakbrook Center. None of these are neighborhood businesses in the traditional sense. They are destination brands choosing a shopping center as their address because the shopping center is, functionally, the only commercial address Oak Brook has.
The Fix Working Its Way Through Village Hall
The one gap none of this touches is groceries, and that is exactly what makes Amazon's current proposal significant. The company has floated a large-format concept for Oak Brook of roughly 225,000 square feet, about 50 percent larger than a typical Costco, blending a full grocery department with pharmacy, household goods, and electronics. As of spring 2026, the proposal was moving through the Village of Oak Brook's review process, starting with a conceptual presentation to the Village Board and headed toward public hearings before the Planning and Zoning Commission.
If it clears that process, it would be the first full-service grocery store in Oak Brook since Jewel closed more than fifty years ago. That is a longer wait than almost any comparable suburb has had to sit through, and it says something about how completely the mall has substituted for ordinary neighborhood retail that a project this size is being discussed as a novelty rather than a routine addition.
The mall's footprint is also expanding sideways. Oak Brook Commons, a mixed-use project rising on the former McDonald's world headquarters site directly adjacent to Oakbrook Center, is planned with five retail and restaurant pads. Once again, the growth is landing at the mall's doorstep rather than spreading into a separate commercial district.
The Free Nights That Didn't Need a Downtown
The clearest evidence that Oakbrook Center functions as Oak Brook's town square, and not just its shopping district, shows up in the programming that costs nothing to attend. Movies on the Lawn runs select Wednesday evenings through the summer with titles like Zootopia and Freakier Friday, timed so shoppers can grab a treat from Lolli & Pops or Molly's Cupcakes before the film starts. Music on the Lawn brings local musicians to a Friday evening concert series starting at 6:30 p.m. Fitness on the Lawn fills Sunday mornings with complimentary yoga, Pilates, and strength classes hosted by lululemon and Life Time. Seasonal touches like the Summer Floral Arches round out a calendar built entirely around the mall's own lawn space, because there is no other public gathering spot in the village positioned to host it.
A community that had a grocery-anchored downtown would likely spread these kinds of events across a few blocks of independent storefronts. Oak Brook stages all of it in one place, because one place is what it has.
The investment case backs this up. JLL data cited in coverage of the UNIQLO opening put Oakbrook Center's annual sales above $1 billion with roughly 14 million visitors a year, and Brookfield's retail division has pointed to the property as a model for how suburban malls can reinvest and stay relevant. Money is following the same logic residents have followed for fifty years: whatever Oak Brook needs next, it will most likely need it at the mall. Even the recent $44 million sale of the nearby Overlook at Oakbrook retail center to Dallas-based Crow Holdings reads as a bet on that same gravity holding.
None of that guarantees the Amazon proposal clears zoning review, and a fifty-year gap doesn't close just because a company files paperwork. But for the first time since the Jewel closed, Oak Brook's missing piece has a specific size, a specific site, and a specific process moving it forward, which is more progress than the last five decades produced combined.
Watching how a place like Oak Brook fills in its own gaps, whether at a mall storefront or through a zoning hearing, tells you a lot about how the village actually works day to day. If you're weighing a move to Oak Brook or anywhere else across Chicagoland and Southeast Wisconsin, the Lisa Wolf Team | wolfpartners GROUP can walk you through what a neighborhood's commercial center says about daily life there, not just what the listing photos show.
