Wishbone fed the West Loop for 36 years, and it never asked anyone to order ahead. This fall the breakfast sandwich people are talking about on Randolph Street comes from a steakhouse. You order it by Thursday night and pick it up at the back door.
The neighborhood's best-known breakfast restaurant closed because a full-time daytime restaurant stopped working financially. The places now serving weekend mornings are dinner and cocktail spots that open for a few hours on Saturday and Sunday because the kitchen and the lease are already paid for. That changes what a West Loop weekend morning looks like. There are fewer walk-in tables and more preorder windows and reservations, and the menus are short and specific.
Block Club Chicago reported on August 3, 2026 that co-owners Joel and Julie Nickson were closing Wishbone at 161 N. Jefferson St. They hoped to stay open through the end of that month. The restaurant started in 1990 at 1800 W. Grand Ave. It spent 26 years at 1001 W. Washington Blvd. and moved to Jefferson in 2018. A Roscoe Village outpost closed in 2019.
The reasons Joel Nickson gave the Chicago Sun-Times were mostly about weekdays. He said business never recovered after offices went remote. "Friday used to be the busiest for lunch. But now it's the slowest. Everybody takes Friday off," he told the paper. Catering was down too. Food and labor costs kept rising, and he called labor costs the "No. 1 problem for restaurants now." In June, a major plumbing problem cost the restaurant a full weekend of business. "My wife and I started realizing, we're one disaster away from being in the hole," Nickson told the Sun-Times.
The math there works against any restaurant that runs breakfast and lunch every day. It pays staff, rent and utilities for seven days of service. When the weekday lunch crowd from nearby offices shrinks, the weekend has to cover more of the week. Wishbone was paying 42 employees at the end, according to the Sun-Times. As of WBEZ's August 12 report, no new tenant had been announced for the Jefferson Street space.
Six blocks away, Susu solved that problem by opening for only six hours a week. The steakhouse at 652 W. Randolph St. occupies the former Grace space. It announced a weekend bakery service set to begin Saturday, October 17, open Saturdays and Sundays from 9 a.m. to noon. WTTW called it a departure for a West Loop steakhouse, since that stretch of Randolph is better known for evening fine dining at Oriole and Sepia and at Grace before it closed.
Chef and partner Alexander Willis told WTTW the bakery is "an extra source of revenue for us" and also "another venue of creativity for me." He and owner Paul Alqas modeled it on Kasama, where Genie Kwon's pastries became a daytime business alongside a destination dinner restaurant. The setup reflects that thinking. According to the launch announcement in Chicago Food Magazine, it runs like this:
"Serving it through the back door gives the bakery its own identity while still feeling completely connected to Susu," Alqas said in the announcement.
The main item is a Wagyu sujuk breakfast sandwich. It has housemade Wagyu beef sausage, French scrambled eggs, American cheese, red shatta aioli and green chermoula on hand-rolled sourdough pita, which Willis calls "Wonder Bread meets pita." The opening pastry list included croissants, a chai cheesecake called Tea Tea Cheesecake, a shakshuka Danish, tahini chocolate chip cookies and a tahini canelé, plus an occasional mystery item.
Limited production, a short menu and payment before anything is baked keep the risk low. That is the risk Nickson described carrying at Wishbone. For anyone used to walking in on a whim, the trade-off is planning: Saturday's sandwich has to be ordered by Thursday.
Kumiko, the Japanese cocktail bar at 630 W. Lake St., follows the same pattern from another direction. WTTW's fall roundup listed Cafe Kumiko as open for weekend brunch with Japanese-style breakfast. According to Kumiko's own cafe page, the cafe began as a sidewalk service window in 2020 and has now come back indoors as the bar's daytime side.
The hours are tight. The cafe runs Saturday and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., with food orders taken until 2:15 p.m. and drinks until 2:30 p.m. Reservations are "strongly recommended" and held for 90 minutes. Walk-ins are accepted when space allows. The menu covers Japanese breakfast, kissaten-style lunch, coffee and tea. It includes a duck-confit breakfast sandwich, grilled-fish teishoku, okonomiyaki, kinako mochi toast and a matcha affogato.
Susu and Kumiko made the same choice. Each one took a room built for evenings and opened it for a short weekend window on terms the restaurant controls. Susu takes payment ahead of time. Kumiko books tables in 90-minute blocks.
Two newer counter-service spots fill in the rest of the week, and neither one requires planning ahead.
| Spot | Address | Format | Weekend timing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Susu bakery | 652 W. Randolph St. | Preorder, back-door pickup | Sat and Sun, 9 a.m. to noon |
| Cafe Kumiko | 630 W. Lake St. | Sit-down, reservations strongly recommended | Sat and Sun, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. |
| Goldn | 111 S. Morgan St. | Bakery and coffee counter | Check current hours |
| Mazor | 485 N. Milwaukee Ave. | Counter-service masa kitchen | Check current hours |
Eater Chicago reported that Goldn opened in mid-July 2026 with pastries, breakfast bagels, coffee, matcha, smoothies and croissants. Mazor is a Guatemalan-Mexican counter built around fresh masa. According to Eater's review, it opened in June 2026 after delays. Eater's earlier preview of Mazor listed tacos, tostadas, empanadas, horchata, aguas frescas and café de olla made with Guatemalan coffee.
Neither is a full-service weekend brunch spot of the kind Wishbone was. For now, that gap in the West Loop is covered by the two dinner-and-drinks businesses at the top of the table.
The fall's opening calendar shows why mornings have become a side business. The big new arrivals are built around evenings.
New investment keeps going into dinner, bar and late-night business, and the weekday office lunch crowd that kept Wishbone busy has thinned out. Weekend mornings sit between those two trends. They are open to any restaurant that already has a kitchen and wants a few more hours of revenue, and mostly unprofitable for one that has to carry the whole week on its own.
The next two big event weekends follow the same split. West Loop Halloween Bar Fest runs October 31 from 4 to 10 p.m. as a self-guided crawl with stops including Esco and Bandit, according to Block Club's Halloween guide. The daytime event is the Randolph Street Holiday Market, scheduled for December 12 and 13 at 1340 W. Washington with 125 vintage, modern and handmade boutiques. If you want Susu's sujuk sandwich on market weekend, preorders for that weekend open Monday, December 7, at 3 p.m.
If you're thinking about a move within the West Loop, or into it, and want to talk through how a particular street works from Saturday morning to Saturday night, Fogel Slate Group is glad to help. Schedule a consultation and we'll walk the neighborhood with you.
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