Buffalo Grove Days returns to Mike Rylko Community Park September 3 through 7, the same five days it has claimed since 1961. The carnival lights go up in the same spot, the parade still ends where it always ends, and if you've lived here more than a couple summers, none of that logistics is news to you.
What might surprise you is how little of the retail buzz from the past year has actually turned into a door you can walk through. Two corridors in town have been generating headlines since January. Almost none of it is open yet, and the one piece that is closest to real belongs to a small cafe most people haven't heard of.
The Corridor Everyone's Watching Isn't Open Yet
Chase Plaza, at Arlington Heights and Lake-Cook roads, has sat mostly empty since Dominick's closed more than a decade ago. The Buffalo, the restaurant and ice cream parlor that had anchored the plaza's outlot for years, closed for good on March 30, 2025, clearing the last obstacle to a full redevelopment.
The village board approved Phase One in January 2026, splitting the old grocery box into a 34,500-square-foot Club Studio fitness club, a luxury brand from the parent company of LA Fitness, and a 27,000-square-foot Sprouts Farmers Market, which would be the chain's first Illinois location. When the village confirmed the Sprouts lease this April, Sprouts' own statement to reporters put the opening in 2027, not 2026. That detail is easy to miss if you only read the celebratory headline about landing the chain's first Illinois store.
Club Studio never had a public opening estimate until this August. At the village board meeting on August 17, developer Louis Schriber III told trustees he expects Sprouts to open in March or April of next year, meaning 2027, with Club Studio landing sometime next summer, also 2027.
The same August meeting introduced Phase Two: a 256-unit apartment building on the plaza's eastern edge, plus demolition of the former Buffalo restaurant building to make way for a roughly 6,000-square-foot outlot space still searching for a tenant. Developer Bob Burk of UrbanStreet Group said candidates include higher-end quick-service restaurants and possibly a bank branch, since a financial tenant would draw less traffic to an already congested corner. Trustees voted unanimously to send the proposal to the planning and zoning commission for further review. Village President Eric Smith called the site the village's entryway from the west and said it's "been an eyesore for over a decade."
None of that is criticism of the project. Redevelopment on this scale takes years, and a corner vacant since the last recession finally moving toward apartments, a grocery anchor, and a modern fitness club is real progress. It's just progress you won't be able to see with your own eyes this Labor Day.
The Timeline, Side By Side
| Project | Location | Status as of August 2026 | Expected opening |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sprouts Farmers Market | Chase Plaza | Lease confirmed in April | 2027, per the company's own statement |
| Club Studio fitness | Chase Plaza | Approved in January, under construction | Summer 2027, per the developer |
| Apartments and new outlot building | Chase Plaza, east and northeast corners | Referred to the plan commission in August | Not yet scheduled |
| Restaurant and banquet facility | 720 W. Lake-Cook Road, former Outback Steakhouse | Revised design recommended for approval this month | About six months out, per the operator |
| Moloco Cafe | 814 S. Buffalo Grove Road | Construction underway as of early June | Owners said as soon as July |
The One New Door You Can Actually Walk Through This Year
At the opposite end of the village, away from the Lake-Cook corridor's fanfare, two local real estate agents have been quietly building out a small cafe and cocktail bar called Moloco Cafe. It sits at 814 S. Buffalo Grove Road, near the Dundee Road intersection, in the Plaza at Buffalo Grove shopping center, sharing a building with La Presa Restaurant and The Continental Restaurant & Banquets.
Owners Tetiana Stadnyk and Alina Predolyak told a local outlet in early June that a firm date hadn't been set but that it could come as soon as July, with construction already underway at the time. Neither has confirmed a firm opening date since, but if July held, Moloco Cafe has been serving coffee, breakfast, and evening cocktails for weeks by the time you read the Buffalo Grove Days schedule.
It's a small addition next to a redevelopment measured in hundreds of apartment units and tens of thousands of square feet. It's also the closest thing to a genuinely new storefront residents can visit this year, which says something about how construction timelines actually move compared to how they're announced.
What The Rest Of Lake-Cook Road Still Looks Like
Further south on Lake-Cook Road, the former Outback Steakhouse building at 720 W. Lake-Cook Road has sat vacant since the restaurant closed in 2015, after occupying the 6,200-square-foot space since 1994. Plans for a new restaurant and banquet facility, from an entity called Epicure Dining LLC, got a second wind earlier this month when the village's planning and zoning commission recommended the board approve a revised design, dropping a 400-square-foot addition that had been part of an earlier plan.
General manager Kon Kruglyak said the venue could open in about six months, pending a village permit. Count forward from late August and that puts a realistic opening somewhere around early 2027, roughly the same window as Sprouts and Club Studio a few miles north.
Put the corridor together and the picture is consistent. Every major project currently active in Buffalo Grove points to 2027, not this fall. If you've been holding out hope for a big reveal by Labor Day, the honest answer is that the reveal is coming, just not yet.
Plan Your Weekend Anyway
None of the corridor timelines affect what happens at Mike Rylko Community Park this week. The festival runs on its own calendar, and this year's schedule includes a few specifics worth building your weekend around:
- The parade steps off Saturday, September 5, at 11:30 a.m., marching south on Buffalo Grove Road from Thompson, then west on Deerfield Parkway to Mike Rylko Community Park.
- Live music through the weekend includes Hi Infidelity, The Brothers Gibb, Nashville Electric, LP Vinyl, and Rod Tuffcurls and the Benchpress.
- The Buddy Baseball All-Star Game, a Rick Kahen Commission event pairing players with buddies, runs Saturday afternoon at Rick Drazner Park.
- The Park District's annual Dog Show takes over Willow Stream Park's Dan Schimmel Pavilion, with categories from best costume to waggiest tail and no advance registration required.
- A Paint & Sip session, led by an instructor from Bottle & Bottega in Arlington Heights, runs Saturday afternoon with drinks and mingling before the painting starts.
- A new addition this year, Puzzle Palooza, has teams of up to four racing to finish a 500-piece history puzzle tied to America's 250th anniversary, with a 90-minute time limit.
- The Rotary Club's Duck Race streams live on Facebook Sunday evening, with results posted Monday, September 7.
Momentum That Doesn't Move In A Straight Line
This spring, U.S. News & World Report named Buffalo Grove the best place to live in Illinois and ranked it 15th nationally, ahead of Naperville, Arlington Heights, and every other suburb in the state. That recognition landed months after developers had already committed to Chase Plaza, not before, which suggests the corridor's turnaround helped earn the ranking rather than the other way around.
But recognition moves faster than construction. The ranking landed in May. The apartment proposal at Chase Plaza only reached the plan commission in August. Sprouts won't open its doors until 2027. Buffalo Grove Days will run its full five days this year exactly as scheduled, and the town around it will look almost exactly like it did last September, with one small cafe near Dundee Road as the exception.
If you're the kind of resident who tracks these corridors because you're curious what your own street is worth once Sprouts and the new apartments actually open, that's a longer conversation, and it's one GetBurbed has with Buffalo Grove homeowners regularly. Request a Free Home Valuation and we'll walk you through what redevelopment like this typically does to nearby home values, and on what kind of timeline you should actually expect to see it.
