The Arboretum Is Turning Into a Restaurant Row, and the Landlord Is Doing It on Purpose

"We believe this is the most beautiful restaurant in the suburbs." That's what Gregg Horan said when The Greggory opened at 100 W. Higgins Road in March 2025, and it's a bold thing to say about a shopping center still anchored by a Jos. A. Bank and a DSW. But it isn't hyperbole so much as a description of what The Arboretum of South Barrington has been building toward, one lease at a time, since new ownership took over in 2022.

If you've lived here through the past few years, you've watched a mall change character without moving an inch. The retail you actually run errands at is still there. What's grown, almost entirely, is the restaurant and entertainment side of the property. And that growth didn't happen randomly. It followed a pattern specific enough to name.

A Landlord With a Type

The Arb's current era started with a default. Hoffman Estates-based Heidner Properties took control of the center in 2022 by purchasing a defaulted $67 million loan on the property, gaining the 484,000-square-foot open-air center as the flagship of its retail portfolio. The sale closed right around the opening of a new Star Cinema Grill, which replaced the former iPic Theaters location in the same building, keeping the same use under new management.

Once Heidner had the keys, the company said publicly it planned capital improvements and a shift in tenant mix toward dining, entertainment, and community-oriented uses. That's a specific stated intention, and the leases signed since then back it up.

Same Footprint, Same Format

The clearest evidence is the space that used to be Pinstripes, the bowling-and-dining concept that anchored the Arb for over a decade. It's now 810 Billiards & Bowling, which signed its lease in November 2025 and opened its first Illinois location there in early 2026. That's not a retailer moving into a restaurant's old footprint. It's one national bowling-and-dining chain getting swapped for another, in the identical building, under the identical owner. Heidner didn't diversify when Pinstripes left. It found another company doing roughly the same thing and signed them to the same address.

That kind of substitution tells you more about a landlord's strategy than any press release does. When Stacy Kallas, Heidner's senior director of marketing, talked to the Daily Herald in 2024 about a wave of new restaurants arriving at once, her reaction was simple:

"It's thrilling. We already have a wonderful roster of restaurants and the additions are just another benefit."

That wave, announced in August 2024, included four restaurants slated to open within months of each other, and the names behind them are worth knowing individually.

The Pedigree Behind the Menus

Horan spent three decades at Gibsons Restaurant Group before this, rising to managing partner and director of operations across some of the highest-grossing steakhouses in the country. Veremis ran Rosewood Restaurant in Rosemont for twenty years. Fabio Viviani already had a restaurant in Lake Zurich before he brought Giostra, described by his team as bringing "a taste of Old Florence," to the Arb. When The Greggory was first announced in that same August 2024 wave, it carried the fuller name The Greggory Hearth & Tavern. By the time it actually opened seven months later, in March 2025, the name had been shortened to just The Greggory, the kind of small branding shift that only shows up if you've been following the project since the announcement.

These aren't operators filling a vacancy. They're people who could have opened in River North and chose a shopping center in South Barrington instead.

What Isn't Changing

The retail side of the Arb looks almost identical to how it looked before Heidner bought the property. L.L.Bean's first Midwest outdoor gear and apparel store is still there. So are Jos. A. Bank, DSW, and Victoria's Secret. There's no new clothing concept, no new furniture retailer, nothing on the apparel side that mirrors the restaurant push. The growth is concentrated entirely in dining and entertainment, and that concentration is the story. The Arb isn't becoming a different kind of place. It's becoming a denser version of the half of itself that was already working.

The Calendar That Proves the Bet

None of this holds up without traffic in the weeks between the summer concert crowds and the holiday shoppers, and the Arb's 2026 calendar reads like a plan built for exactly that gap. The Wickstrom Auto Group summer concert series ran through August, featuring acts like the pop tribute show Beyond The Blonde. Supercar Saturday, which the Arb itself billed as one of the year's biggest draws, now runs on a digital registration system with parking maps distributed in advance, the kind of infrastructure a venue only builds once a crowd outgrows informal planning.

Autumn in Normandy is scheduled for September 15, a little over a week from now, and Paint the Town Barrington, the community's outdoor plein air painting event, has run in the same late-summer window in past years. Both land right after the concert series wraps and well before the holiday season fills tables on its own, which is precisely when a property depends on a standalone reason to bring people back to Giostra, The Greggory, and 810 on a Tuesday night.

Why This Matters If You Live Here

You don't need to care about loan defaults or tenant-mix strategy to notice the practical result. South Barrington now has a steakhouse staffed by three decades of Gibsons pedigree, a Fabio Viviani restaurant that isn't a one-off, and a bowling alley that replaced a bowling alley because the format works here. None of it happened at once, and none of it happened by accident. It happened in sequence: a 2022 sale, a four-restaurant wave announced in 2024, The Greggory's delayed opening in March 2025, and 810 Billiards & Bowling signing on for the old Pinstripes space that November and opening in early 2026.

Four years of the same owner making the same kind of bet is not a coincidence you'd catch from a single visit. It's the kind of pattern that only shows up if you've been paying attention the whole time, which is the point of living somewhere instead of just passing through it.

The next time someone asks what there is to do in South Barrington besides drive into the city, you have a real answer, and it's one the Arb keeps updating every few months.

If you're weighing what a neighborhood like this actually offers day to day, not just on a map, Kate Fanselow and her team know these details because they live here too. Let's talk about your next move.