"We were really seeking a tenant who would honor this building and make it a continuing source of pride for the community." As The Hinsdalean reported, Trustee Alexis Braden told her fellow board members last April, describing what the village wanted for the empty storefront inside Hinsdale's downtown train depot. She wasn't talking about a strip mall unit or a landlord's spreadsheet. She was talking about a building that has stood at the Metra stop on Hinsdale Avenue for roughly 130 years, and about why filling one restaurant space took the better part of a year.
After Casa Margarita's lease ended, the village, as landlord, used a public process to select a tenant for the storefront, with the elected board voting on the lease.
A Public Landlord, Not a Private One
The space at 25 E. Hinsdale Ave. sits inside a building the village government owns outright, which means every lease that goes into it has to clear the Village Board, not just a broker and a signature. Before it can even bring in a new tenant, Hinsdale has to consult with BNSF Railway, since the depot sits on active rail property.
That structure has real financial history behind it. For 13 years, the space was home to Cosi, and that lease brought the village about $80,000 a year in rent, according to village manager Kathleen Gargano. When Casa Margarita's nine-year run in the same space ended with its lease expiring on May 31, 2025, the village wasn't just losing a tenant. It was losing a predictable line of municipal revenue tied to one of downtown's most visible commercial addresses.
That's the detail easy to miss walking past the depot every morning: the rent for that storefront doesn't go to some anonymous property owner. It goes into the village's own books.
Eleven Months, Nine Proposals, One Vote
The timeline tells its own story about how deliberate this process was. The village issued a formal request for proposals in June 2025, weeks after Casa Margarita's lease ended. By August 2025, then-Village President Greg Hart was already fielding interest from eight different restaurant concepts, ranging from what he described as casual dining to boutique-style food, spanning upscale American, Italian, and Mexican concepts.
By the time a selection committee sat down to evaluate the field, that had grown to nine formal proposals: eight restaurants and one retail concept. The committee wasn't just staff. It included Hart, Trustee Braden, and Economic Development Commission Chair Jill Sunderson, evaluating each pitch on the principals' track record, financial stability, fit with Hinsdale's existing business mix, and what Braden called community and village benefit.
In January 2026, Hart told Patch a selection had been made but declined to name the winner, citing ongoing negotiations. It wasn't until April 2026 that the board formally advanced a lease agreement to a second reading, and later that month, on April 21, trustees gave final approval. The selection process ran just under eleven months, from Casa Margarita's lease ending in May 2025 to the lease's approval in April 2026, and included a public evaluation.
What Hometown Coffee and Juice Is Betting On
The winner is Hometown Coffee and Juice, a café founded by Lou and Julie Rubin about eight years ago. Rubin described the concept to trustees as an all-day, all-age, everyday café, built to solve what he saw as a gap in the market. Coffee shops, he said, let you linger with friends but don't serve very good food. Restaurants serve good food but are focused on turning tables. Hometown is designed to split the difference, with what Rubin calls a real chef in the kitchen and food made from scratch.
The chain currently operates in Glencoe, Winnetka, Lake Forest, and Glenview, all North Shore suburbs. Hinsdale will be its fifth location and its first west of the city, a detail Rubin emphasized directly. "This is our first opportunity to come to the western suburbs," he told the board. "This is where we wanted to be."
That's worth sitting with for a second. A café with an established four-location track record on the North Shore chose Hinsdale's train depot, of all the western suburb options available to it, as the spot to make that jump. The selection committee's criteria around financial stability and community fit clearly mattered here. This isn't a first-time operator testing a concept. It's a business with eight years of operating history betting on Hinsdale commuters specifically.
The Numbers Behind an Eleven-Year Commitment
The lease itself runs 11 years, with two five-year extension options that could stretch the relationship to 21 years total. Rent starts at $8,239 a month, or $31 per square foot on the depot's 3,224-square-foot space, which works out to just under $99,000 a year. That's roughly $19,000 more annually than what Cosi paid for the same footprint, a meaningful jump for a space the village had to actively market for nearly a year to fill.
If Hometown exercises both extensions, rent climbs to $11,193 a month, or $42 per square foot, by year 11, and eventually to $15,042 a month, or $56 per square foot, by year 21. Numbers like that only make sense if a business believes commuter traffic through that station is a stable, growing customer base for two decades, not a short-term novelty.
The lease also requires Hometown to spend a minimum of $1.25 million renovating the space, which will include expanding the outdoor patio and relocating the entry door to the south side of the building. Trustee Matt Posthuma noted during the lease review that the renovation commitment factored directly into the rent the village negotiated. In effect, the village traded a lower starting rent for a tenant willing to put real capital into a 130-year-old building that most riders have never thought of as historic.
What Changes on the Platform
For the first year, Hometown's Hinsdale location will run 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. on weekdays and 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekends. After that first year, the owners can request to shift weekday closing to 5 p.m. if the evening hours prove slow, a built-in adjustment period written directly into the lease. The menu will include coffee, cold-pressed juices, smoothie bowls, sandwiches, salads, giant pretzels, bakery items, and alcoholic drinks, a broader spread than either Cosi or Casa Margarita offered in the same footprint.
The village's own memo on the deal flagged one more detail worth watching: the adjacent Metra ticket office space was identified as a potential future expansion opportunity for Hometown, meaning the café's footprint inside the depot could eventually grow beyond its initial lease. Rubin has said he hopes to open by the end of 2026, which would put a new business back in that storefront roughly 19 months after Casa Margarita's lease ended.
Hinsdale treated a train station café as a civic decision worth nine competing proposals, three named committee members, and a public vote.
If you're watching how downtown Hinsdale continues to evolve, block by block and lease by lease, that kind of local detail is exactly what The Anne Monckton Group tracks every day. Book an appointment if you'd like to talk about what any of it means for your own plans in Hinsdale.
