Labor Day weekend wraps up today in Market Square, where the Deer Path Art League is closing out its 71st Art Fair on the Square, same lawn, same fountain, same 130 juried artists set up under the towers of Howard Van Doren Shaw's century-old shopping court. The Taste of Serbia Festival already had its turn earlier in the weekend. If you live here, you already know both events happen every year without fail, which is exactly the point. Nothing about them needed reinventing.
Six months earlier, something did get reinvented, and it happened inside the building most residents associate with the least change: the Deer Path Inn. For nearly a century, the inn's formal dining room operated as the English Room. This spring, it became The Brasserie. That single swap, one dining room retiring a name it had carried since before most of the town's current homeowners were born, is the thread worth pulling on, because it reveals something about how Lake Forest actually handles change. The town doesn't replace its institutions. It renovates them from the inside, on its own schedule, and usually without much fanfare.
A Dining Room Gets a New Name, Not a New Address
The English Room had been a fixture of the Deer Path Inn's dining program for generations, the kind of room longtime residents mean when they say they had dinner "at the inn." When the property unveiled The Brasserie this year, the inn's general manager, James Barnett, described it as a "thoughtful evolution of one of the inn's most storied dining venues," which is a careful way of saying the identity stayed put even as the room around it changed.
What actually changed is substantial. The space now displays more than 70 works by British and Chicago-based artists, hung salon-style, including David Hockney's The Blue Guitar alongside pieces by David Shrigley. The menu runs from chilled oysters and seafood towers to herb-crusted lamb meant for sharing, grass-fed steaks, flounder meunière, an oxtail-enriched onion soup, and a dry-aged burger for anyone who wants something less formal. The inn even added printed conversation cards to the tables, a small detail aimed at getting people talking rather than scrolling between courses. The Brasserie now opens at 6 a.m. on weekdays and 6:30 a.m. on weekends, running straight through to 10 p.m., which means it covers breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert in a single continuous service window the English Room never tried to hold.
The building didn't move. The name inside it did. That is the pattern to watch for the rest of this fall.
A Chef Who Already Knew the North Shore
Not everything new this season came from an existing Lake Forest address reinventing itself. Follia is a genuinely new arrival, and it's worth understanding why its owner picked this town for it. Chef Bruno Abate opened the original Follia in New York's Meatpacking District, then brought a second concept, Tocco, to Winnetka. Follia's return under its own name landed in Lake Forest this year, which makes this the chef's second North Shore location rather than a first-time bet on an unproven market.
That matters for how you read the restaurant. Follia isn't a concept testing whether Lake Forest can support Italian fine dining. It's an operator who already knows the North Shore audience, deciding this town earned the name back. The restaurant has quickly become the kind of place that fills up on weekend evenings, with a courtyard patio guests specifically request for its atmosphere. Posted hours run Tuesday through Thursday and Sunday from 5 to 9 p.m., stretching to 10 p.m. on Friday and Saturday. If you haven't been, calling ahead beats walking in.
Near the Citadel Theatre corridor on South Waukegan Road, the dining options expanded too, giving theatergoers something closer to a full dinner before curtain than the area's longtime standby of pizza. It's a smaller addition than a Brasserie-scale renovation, but it fills a gap regulars at the theater have mentioned for years.
A Working Farm Started Selling Tickets
If the Deer Path Inn shows how a landmark reinvents itself quietly, Elawa Farm shows how a 16-acre working farm turned its own calendar into a business model without losing what made it a farm.
The property dates to 1917, when it operated as a gentleman's farm. The City of Lake Forest purchased the land in 1998, and the nonprofit Elawa Farm Foundation now runs it as a working organic farm, event space, and educational center adjacent to the Middlefork Savanna forest preserve. What's changed isn't the farm's mission. It's how deliberately the foundation has built a paid programming calendar around that mission, with named instructors and specific price points rather than generic "farm visit" admission.
Here's what's actually on the books through October:
- September 29 – Adventures at Elawa, a fall-flavors cooking session led by program manager Grace Hart, $121 per ticket
- September 30 – Burger Night, a community dinner, $48 per ticket
- September 30 – Outdoor yoga session, $42 per ticket
- Multiple Tuesdays, September 12 through October 31 – Viva Bistro cooking demos with Chef Mickey, $42 per ticket
- October 6 – Bookbinding workshop with visual artist Regin Igloria, $121 per ticket
- October 7 – Early fall harvest cooking demo with Chef Mickey, $58 per ticket
- October 13 – Mommy & Me Yoga, $121 per ticket
- October 15 – Fall cupcake decorating class, $37 per ticket
- October 15 – Mexican tamale-making class, $116 per ticket
Compare that against the free, 20,000-person Art Fair happening the same season a few miles away. One event scales by opening the gates wide. The other scales by keeping classes small and specific, with a named chef or artist attached to nearly every session. Both approaches work for what they're trying to do, and seeing them side by side says something real about how this town supports its cultural calendar: mass participation for the traditions that don't need curating, ticketed intimacy for the ones that do.
The One Thing Nobody Tried to Fix
It's worth sitting with why the Art Fair and the Taste of Serbia Festival didn't change while the inn and the farm did. Some things in Lake Forest are already running at capacity for what they're meant to be. The Art Fair draws artists from across the country, offers $3,000 in prize money, and fills Market Square and Western Avenue for two days every Labor Day weekend without needing a redesign. It works because it's been dialed in for 71 years. There's no version of "reinventing" that improves on a formula that already sells out the sidewalk.
That's the actual shape of change in Lake Forest this fall. It isn't sweeping. It's selective, and it happens to the things that were ready for it: a dining room that had grown a little formal for how people actually eat now, a farm calendar that had more capacity than programming, a restaurant scene that had room for a chef who'd already proven himself elsewhere on the North Shore. The Art Fair and the Serbian festival didn't get touched because they didn't need to be.
If you're the kind of resident who tracks this stuff, that's the piece worth remembering heading into winter: watch what changes here, not what's added. Lake Forest rarely adds. It reworks.
If you're weighing a move within town, whether that means more space for a growing family or a smaller footprint after decades in the same house, the same instinct applies to real estate here as it does to a dining room or a farm calendar. The best presentation usually comes from working with what's already there rather than starting over. That's the kind of listing strategy Gina Shad builds for Lake Forest sellers, and if you'd like a complimentary home valuation and marketing plan to see what that could look like for your own address, we're happy to put one together.
