Why Elmwood Park's Newest Bakery Skipped Restaurant Row
October 1, 2026
October 1, 2026
"There is no Polonia here anymore. So how does it make sense to have a Polish bakery here?"
That's Waclaw Wiklanski, explaining why he packed up a bakery that had spent more than a decade on Chicago's Northwest Side and moved it west into Elmwood Park. He wasn't chasing a bigger storefront or better foot traffic. He was reacting to a wrecking ball. The building his shop occupied at 6006 W. Belmont Ave. was slated for demolition to make way for a Starbucks with a drive-thru, and the neighborhood around it had already stopped looking like the Polish enclave it once was. Wiklanski's Bakery needed a new home, and the home it found was Elmwood Park.
If you assumed that meant North Avenue, you'd be wrong. And that mistake is worth untangling, because it says something about how Elmwood Park's food scene actually works that the postcard version of the village leaves out.
Wiklanski's Bakery had operated at its Belmont Avenue location since 2012, on a stretch of the Northwest Side that had itself once housed Richard's Polish Bakery before Wiklanski took it over. By early March 2026, the relocation to Elmwood Park was, in Wiklanski's own words, about 95 percent complete. He was waiting on new windows, a replacement fridge, and some office furnishings before reopening a few blocks over the border at 7717-19 W. Belmont Ave., this time on the Elmwood Park side of the line. He expected to be open by the middle of the month.
Six months later, the bakery has settled into its new address and the paczki, rye loaves, and cheesecakes that made the old shop a destination are now an Elmwood Park fixture instead of a Chicago one. But the address matters. Belmont Avenue isn't North Avenue. It isn't the corridor most people picture when they think about where Elmwood Park eats.
North Avenue's reputation as Elmwood Park's dining strip didn't happen by accident, and it isn't new. Massa Cafe Italiano has been pouring house-roasted coffee and plating classic Italian dishes at 7434 W. North Ave. since 1968. Jim & Pete's, a few blocks down at 7806 W. North Ave., has been serving thin-crust pizza and pasta since 1941, a run current owner Michael Bucchianeri has kept alive through generations of regulars. New Star, at 7444 W. North Ave., traces back more than sixty years to the Moy family, who ran the kitchen until Tommy Moy retired in 2014 and handed the torch to the next generation. Johnnie's Beef, at 7500 W. North Ave., built its name the old-fashioned way: a short menu, an Italian beef sandwich people drive across the region for, and a line that rarely disappears.
That's the anchor tenants. The newer names on the same stretch, Gringo & Blondie Taqueria at 7514 W. North Ave. and additions like Blue Fire and Red Bottle Bar & Grill near 7438 W. North Ave., have moved in around those long-standing kitchens rather than replacing them. In its own economic development messaging, the village has pointed to this pattern directly, crediting new restaurants for choosing to open next to decades-old standards rather than displacing them. That's the version of Elmwood Park's food scene that gets talked about most, and it's a real one. It's just not where Wiklanski's Bakery landed.
Elmwood Park's dining geography spreads across more streets than the one everyone name-checks. Conti Parkway, the stretch locals call the Circle, has its own roster, including Circle Tavern at 18 W. Conti Parkway. Grand Avenue carries its own lineup too: Culver's at 7542 W. Grand Ave., Tacos 2 Go at 7530 W. Grand Ave., and Shea's further out at 7841 W. Grand Ave. Thatcher Avenue has Russell's Barbecue at 1621 N. Thatcher. None of these are secondary to North Avenue. They're just less photographed.
This is the part of Elmwood Park's food scene that a Restaurant Row headline tends to flatten. The village isn't growing one strip. It's growing several at once, and Wiklanski's decision to settle on Belmont Avenue rather than jockeying for a spot on the famous stretch is a small but clear example of that. The bakery didn't need North Avenue's foot traffic or its brand recognition. It needed a building, a fair lease, and a village willing to work with a business that was displaced somewhere else. Belmont Avenue offered all three.
For anyone who's spent time in the Circle during the Taste, or grabbed a burger off Grand Avenue on a Tuesday night, this shouldn't be a surprise. The corridors have always run in parallel. What changed this year is that one of them absorbed a business that got squeezed out of its old neighborhood entirely, and it happened away from the strip that usually gets the credit.
The closest thing Elmwood Park has to a citywide meeting point for its scattered food scene is Dine-In Elmwood Park, the village's annual restaurant week. In 2026 it ran from February 6 through February 15, and the participating list read like a cross-section of every corridor in this piece rather than a single strip's highlight reel. New Star offered a $17 dine-in menu on North Avenue. Donny G's, at 7308 W. North Ave., ran a $45 four-course dinner. Circle Tavern, on Conti Parkway, cut prices on smashburgers and pizza. Culver's and Tacos 2 Go, both on Grand Avenue, ran their own specials. Russell's Barbecue, out on Thatcher, threw in a free drink with lunch or dinner purchases.
Village President Angelo "Skip" Saviano has framed the week as proof that people travel from around the region to eat in Elmwood Park, and the spread of participating addresses backs that up better than any single corridor could. Restaurant week works precisely because it doesn't confine itself to North Avenue. For one stretch every February, the village's separate commercial strips function as one connected food crawl, even though the rest of the year they operate as distinct, largely self-contained scenes that residents navigate one street at a time.
The bakery itself carries the kind of inventory that made the original Belmont Avenue location a stop worth making a special trip for. Traditional Polish rye bread, paczki, and made-from-scratch cheesecakes sit alongside savory rolls, the same lineup that built its following on the Northwest Side over more than a decade. The move west didn't change the product. It changed the zip code, and it changed which village gets to claim the bakery as one of its own.
Wiklanski, for his part, doesn't sound like someone still mourning the old spot. He's called the move a breath of fresh air, and pointed out that if the building on Belmont hadn't faced demolition, he might have stayed there another two years out of simple inertia. Instead, a redevelopment decision made on the other side of the city line put a Polish bakery on an Elmwood Park street that had nothing to do with the wrecking ball, the new Starbucks, or the demographic shift Wiklanski described in his old neighborhood.
That's worth remembering the next time someone asks what's new in Elmwood Park's food scene and the answer that comes back is always North Avenue. Restaurant Row earned its reputation one long-running kitchen at a time. But this year's most interesting arrival didn't come from growth on that strip at all. It came from a demolition on the other side of the city line, and it landed on Belmont.
Next time you're picking up a dozen paczki, take the extra fifteen minutes to loop through the Circle and up North Avenue. It's the fastest way to see how many different versions of Elmwood Park's food scene exist within a single afternoon. For more on daily life across the village, Gagliardo Group keeps a running guide to Elmwood Park's streets, corridors, and everything happening between them.