The Same Name Keeps Showing Up on Front Street
September 3, 2026
September 3, 2026
Walk two blocks of Front Street on a Saturday morning and you will pass a burger joint with picnic tables out front, a deli tucked into a building that used to sell soft-serve, a pizza-and-sports-bar combo with a curtained-off backyard, a whiskey lounge with no sign to speak of, and, as of this year, a café that doubles as a bookstore with a hi-fi bar upstairs. Five stops. Five different vibes. One name on the paperwork for all of them.
That name is Eric Schlickman, and if you have eaten in downtown Wheaton at any point in the last seven years, there is a good chance you have already given him your money without knowing it.
Schlickman is a Wheaton North graduate and a former architect who traded blueprints for build-outs starting in 2019, when he converted a former auto repair shop on Front Street into 302 Wheaton, a burger stop with a family-hangout, vacation-vibe patio. From there the list grows fast. He and a group of partners saved Shane's Deli, tucked into the old Cock Robin ice cream stand, and kept the vintage Cock Robin sign in storage rather than let it disappear with the building's last use. In 2023 he opened Dough and The Backyard in the former Carlson's Art Supply Store at 111 E. Front Street, a twin concept with a 220-seat pizza restaurant up front, eleven TVs, and a Detroit-style crust on the menu, plus an 80-seat event space behind it built for game nights and live entertainment. Subourbon Whisky, Wine, and Cocktail Bar runs quietly out of the back entrance of a different Front Street building. And in 2026, in that same building's second floor, he opened The Guild: part café, part bookstore, part vinyl-forward bar, with couches and reading chairs stacked between the bookcases.
Allison Orr, the Downtown Wheaton Association's executive director, has taken to calling him one of downtown's "serial entrepreneurs." It is not hyperbole. It is closer to an understatement.
If you laid it out as a timeline instead of a map, the pattern gets even clearer:
Six concepts, four buildings, one throughline. It is the kind of pattern that only becomes visible once someone points it out, because each concept looks and feels different enough that most people treat them as unrelated businesses that happen to share a zip code.
The Guild did not land in just any building. The space at 121 W. Front Street has cycled through a string of restaurant concepts before, including Maypole and Emmett's Brewing Co., and 2025, the year Schlickman and his partner Bob Davidson filed for the liquor license, marked the building's 150th year in operation. Davidson brings his own local footprint to the partnership. He owns Blackberry Market in downtown Glen Ellyn, known for its cinnamon rolls, and the pairing gives The Guild a built-in breakfast identity that neither man's earlier ventures had on their own.
Orr has said that keeping the bones of these old Front Street buildings intact matters to Schlickman, that it is part of what lets a place feel connected to what longtime residents remember about growing up in Wheaton while still working for the town it is today. That continuity, more than any single menu item, is probably the real product here. Downtown Wheaton is not getting a rotating cast of concepts that open and vanish. It is getting the same handful of people iterating on the same handful of buildings, learning what works before they move to the next address.
None of this means Schlickman is the only story on Front Street this year. Positano Ristorante, an Italian spot with roots in Oakbrook Terrace, opened a second location in the former Wok-n-Fire space, positioned directly across from the Wheaton French Market pavilion at Liberty Drive and Cross Street. Ditka's Grill opened at 225 W. Front Street with a menu built around steak, seafood, and brunch. Jim Kozik, the city's planning and economic development director, has pointed to the Positano opening as proof that a previously limited-hours space is now activated full time, which is planning-department language for saying the block is filling in rather than just churning.
Orr's read on the moment is that downtown Wheaton is becoming more of a destination for people looking for a real night out, not just a place to grab dinner before heading elsewhere. Whether that holds up over the next few years is a question only time will answer, but the current inventory of openings backs it up more than it contradicts it.
Underneath all the restaurant openings, one Saturday-morning ritual has stayed fixed. The Wheaton French Market, run by Bensidoun USA, returns to the pavilion near Main Street and Liberty Drive every Saturday from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., a run that started April 11 this year and continues through October 31, with shorter 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. hours carrying the market into late November. It is the same footprint the market has occupied for four seasons now: flowers, produce, baked goods, and a rotating vendor list, plus live music most weeks. If you have not made it out yet this season, there is still time before the run ends, and the walk from the market pavilion to Positano's front door takes about ninety seconds.
What ties the market to the restaurant boom is less about food and more about foot traffic. A weekly draw at one end of downtown gives every new concept on Front Street a built-in Saturday audience already in a browsing mood, coffee in hand, deciding where to eat lunch. Schlickman and Davidson did not build The Guild in a vacuum. They built it two blocks from a market that has been training people to treat downtown Wheaton as a weekend destination since 2023.
None of this is really about restaurants. It is about what happens when a small number of people with a track record keep betting on the same handful of blocks. Downtown Wheaton's dining scene did not grow by accident or by a wave of unconnected small business optimism. A large share of it grew because one person kept reinvesting in buildings he already understood, alongside partners who brought their own local reputations to the table. That is a different kind of downtown than one built purely on outside chains or one-off openings, and it is worth knowing if you already call this neighborhood home.
If you are the kind of person who tracks these things the way I do, you already know that a downtown's character shows up in details like this: who keeps coming back, which buildings get a second act instead of a teardown, and whether the same names keep showing up on Front Street. That is the kind of neighborhood knowledge Nancy Winchester brings to every conversation about Wheaton, whether you are grabbing lunch at 302 or just curious what is opening next. If a move is somewhere on your horizon, reach out for an instant home valuation and staging plan, and let's talk about what the rest of downtown Wheaton has planned.
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