For more than two decades, 1165 Wilmette Ave. smelled like a butcher shop is supposed to smell: cold case, sawdust, the low hum of a walk-in running through another Tuesday. Joe Spera ran the business his father Al had opened in Winnetka back in the 1960s, and when he brought it downtown in 2001, Al's Meat Market became the kind of fixture other storefronts spend money trying to fake with reclaimed wood and pendant lighting. Late in 2025, Spera told The Record North Shore he was retiring. He didn't say much else. By early January 2026, the display case was gone.
What moved into that space afterward is the more interesting story, and it has almost nothing to do with meat.
A License That Didn't Exist Yet
The Mette, a cocktail bar and lounge now operating at that same address, describes itself on its own site as Wilmette's first and only bar. That's a specific claim, and the paper trail backs it up. Every liquor license Wilmette had on the books before this one capped alcohol at half of a business's total sales. A restaurant could pour drinks. A tavern that made most of its money on drinks alone had no legal path to exist here.
Wilmette Village Attorney Jeffrey Stein put it to trustees directly when the concept for this space first came up in November 2023:
"This would be a first for Wilmette."
The board had to draft an entirely new license classification before Jason Sander, The Mette's owner and a Wilmette resident, could open a business built around the bar rather than the kitchen. Village staff eventually set the fee for that new tier at $6,000 a year, a step above the $5,000 ceiling that had applied to the highest existing class.
Why This Took Fifty Years to Come Up
Wilmette was a dry village for decades after national Prohibition ended. A 1974 referendum finally allowed liquor sales in grocery stores and restaurants, a full decade before Winnetka followed with its own vote in 1982, and decades ahead of Kenilworth, which didn't get there until 2017. Even after 1974, though, Wilmette kept every on-premise license tethered to food. A stand-alone bar was never contemplated in the code, because nobody had asked.
When the Al's Meat Market building came up for a liquor license review, trustees weighed how much nightlife downtown could handle. Village Manager Mike Braiman came in with a number: over the previous year, police had fielded six nighttime calls near Wilmette establishments licensed to serve until 1 a.m. Only two of those six involved actual patrons of those businesses. His read on the data was blunt: "There is not a demonstrated public safety issue with places serving alcohol until 1 a.m." Trustee Kathy Dodd was more cautious about what the vote actually meant. "We need to recognize that maybe this is moving us in the direction of a tavern and we can be open to that," she said, adding that the board shouldn't be surprised if the next applicant asks for the same treatment.
The Plan on Paper Wasn't the Plan That Opened
The 2023 pitch that got this whole process started wasn't for a stand-alone bar at all. Building owner Mike Chookaszian, who also holds a stake in neighboring restaurants Pescadero and Napolita, teamed up with Keith and Molly Veneziano, whose R.O.M.E. Sandwich Company had run as a pop-up out of Al's for three summers, to propose a hybrid: butcher shop by day, bourbon bar by night. Molly Veneziano talked about restoring the space to something closer to its original character, with a higher tin ceiling and a J-shaped bar built around the existing display case.
That version never opened. By the time the license actually cleared and the buildout got underway in 2026, Sander was the operator listed on the paperwork, Chookaszian had settled into a minority ownership position as landlord and investor rather than co-operator, and the butcher shop side of the concept didn't survive the transition. Al's closed for good instead of sharing the floor with a bar. Downtown Wilmette, which as recently as a few years ago supported three independent butchers, Al's, NorShore Meats and Deli, and Zier's Prime Meats and Poultry, is now down to one after NorShore closed in 2022 and Al's followed this year.
What's Actually Different on the Ground
Walk downtown right now and the change is visible in three specific storefronts, not just one:
- The Mette, 1165 Wilmette Ave. Open Tuesday through Thursday from 5 p.m. and Friday and Saturday from 3 p.m., per its OpenTable listing, with a cocktail-forward menu and a kitchen built to complement dinner elsewhere rather than replace it.
- Small Cheval, 1139 Wilmette Ave. Opened Aug. 13, 2025, inside the 150-year-old former train depot that Hogsalt Hospitality bought from the village in 2023 and most recently housed Depot Nuevo. It's the chain's 11th location and its first stop in the north suburbs beyond Rosemont.
- The Henry, 1515 Sheridan Road at Plaza del Lago. Opened June 3, 2026, an all-day concept from Phoenix-based Fox Restaurant Concepts that runs from morning coffee through late-night cocktails.
All three sit within roughly half a mile of each other. A resident can start with a drink at The Mette, walk to Small Cheval for a burger, or head the short distance to Plaza del Lago for The Henry's dinner menu, and cover ground that a year ago simply didn't offer that option after dark.
Whether the Exception Stays an Exception
The Mette's license is written narrowly. Per the 2023 board discussion, it applies only within the downtown Wilmette business district, not village-wide. But that boundary may not hold forever. At a Judiciary Committee meeting in February 2026, Trustee Andrew Leonard raised the idea that other parts of the village could eventually make a case for the same classification, while urging the board to think through the precedent carefully before saying yes again. Nothing has moved beyond that comment so far, but the door Stein and the board opened in 2023 is still open.
None of this happened because a national chain lobbied for it. It happened because a family business changed hands, a building owner and two longtime pop-up operators had an idea, and the village had to decide, storefront by storefront, how much its own fifty-year-old rulebook still fit the downtown it actually has. Al's counter is gone, but the debate it forced is still shaping what comes next on Wilmette Avenue.
If you're keeping track of how downtown Wilmette keeps shifting block by block, the Wilmette neighborhood guide from Matt Laricy covers what's changing here beyond the storefronts. List with Laricy. Sell faster, reach more buyers.
