Walk from Rude Rooster at 109 S Main Street to Rosemary and Jeans at 116 S Main Street and you have covered less than the length of a football field. Keep going another two minutes to Babcock's Grove House at 101 W St. Charles Road and you have walked past three restaurants that opened in three different centuries of the same three blocks. That is not a metaphor. One of these buildings went up before Lombard was Lombard.
If you live near downtown, you have probably eaten at all three without stopping to notice what they actually tell you about how this stretch of Main Street works. It is not that Lombard has a good food scene, plenty of towns do. It is that the newest addition to the block is built to turn over fast, while the two buildings on either side of it have already survived one full change of hands each and kept going. That gap is the story.
The New One: Built for Speed
Rude Rooster showed up in the space at 109 S Main Street, Unit D, a spot that sat with a permitted but empty storefront through much of 2025. Owner Ahmad Harb spent about a year planning the concept before opening: Nashville hot chicken tenders cooked in beef tallow, smash burgers, halal chicken, and homemade ice cream, all built around a fast-casual counter model rather than table service. It shares its building with MOTW Coffee and sits directly across Main Street from Rosemary and Jeans.
The business model is designed for reach, not roots. Rude Rooster's own site lists delivery service stretching well past Lombard proper, into Villa Park, Glen Ellyn, Addison, Elmhurst, Glendale Heights, Oakbrook Terrace, Wheaton, and Oak Brook. A rewards app, catering packages for offices and parties, online ordering built around 45-minute delivery windows. This is a concept engineered to be discovered on a phone before it is discovered on foot. That is a perfectly good way to run a restaurant. It is also a completely different bet than the two buildings flanking it.
The House That Changed Hands: Rosemary and Jeans
Rosemary and Jeans Public House occupies a white Colonial at 116 S Main Street built in the early 1920s, known locally as the Alice Gray House. Before it was a restaurant it was the office of The Lombardian newspaper. Matt and Tracy Nelson opened the restaurant there in 2019 and named it after their two mothers, Rosemary and Jean.
What most regulars may not track closely is that Rosemary and Jeans quietly passed to new ownership in the years since. Javier Avila joined as executive chef in March 2023, and he and his wife Esperanza have since taken over as owners. The name stayed. The address stayed. The Nelsons' story stayed attached to the sign out front even after the people running the kitchen changed entirely. That is a specific kind of continuity: not the same owners for seven years, but the same identity surviving an ownership transition intact, which is a harder thing for a small restaurant to pull off than simply staying open.
The Building Older Than the Village: Babcock's Grove House
Babcock's Grove House sits inside a limestone building constructed in 1858, one of the oldest surviving structures in DuPage County. The building went up eleven years before Lombard incorporated as a village in 1869. Before Lombard had a name, the area around what's now St. Charles Road and Park Avenue was called Babcock's Grove, and that same building housed the town's first tavern back when a kid needed a parent's permission slip to get a drink there.
Steve and Dana Moreau opened the restaurant in that building in 2016, ten years ago this year. Dana, a former Lombard village trustee, has talked about what it took to bring a 19th-century hotel building back to life for a modern kitchen.
"There were surprises behind every plaster wall and under every floor joist. There's not a single level surface in this place and I've decided to find it charming."
The Moreaus have run it continuously since, and the restaurant now pours Noon Whistle Brewing's Lilacia Farmhouse Ale and Cozmo American Pale Ale, both brewed nearby at Noon Whistle's own taproom on Roosevelt Road, which opened in December 2014 and has since expanded to a second location in Naperville. Babcock's also runs its own bar inside the building, The Lilac League, named for the same lilac identity that gives the whole village its unofficial nickname.
Three Doors, Three Timelines
| Restaurant | Building era | Years at current concept | Ownership continuity |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rude Rooster | Current storefront buildout | Under 1 year | Original owner, day one |
| Rosemary and Jeans | Early 1920s Colonial house | 7 years since founding | Passed to new owners in 2023, name kept |
| Babcock's Grove House | 1858 limestone hotel | 10 years this year | Original owners since opening |
Set side by side, the pattern is not subtle. The two restaurants inside buildings with real architectural history are the ones that have proven they can survive a decade or absorb an ownership change without losing their identity. The one built around a modern fast-casual model is the one still finding out whether it lasts.
What This Actually Means If You Live Near Main Street
This is not a comment on which restaurant serves better food. It is a comment on what kind of business tends to anchor a block like this one long term versus what tends to cycle through it. A limestone building from 1858 or a Colonial house from the early 1920s is not cheap or simple to retrofit into a working kitchen. Dana Moreau's own description of the process, plaster walls with surprises behind every one, floor joists that needed real work, tells you the buyer had to be committed to that specific building before they ever committed to the restaurant concept inside it. That kind of commitment tends to produce owners who stay.
A modern storefront buildout, on the other hand, is designed to be flexible. It can become a hot chicken counter this year and something else in three years without anyone needing to touch a load-bearing wall. That flexibility is exactly why fast-casual concepts cluster into spaces like 109 S Main Street, and it is exactly why you should not assume the newest name on a storefront sign downtown is the one that will still be there in five years.
If you are watching this block because you already live nearby, the takeaway is simple. The two buildings with real history behind them, Babcock's Grove House and Rosemary and Jeans, have both already weathered a real transition, a full decade in one case and a change of ownership in the other, and both kept their footing. That is the more reliable read on what downtown Lombard's core actually looks like day to day, not the newest name on the newest sign.
If you are weighing what a home near this stretch of Main Street is actually worth, the same logic applies more broadly than restaurants. A block's staying power usually shows up in the buildings that outlast a single owner or a single business cycle, not the ones optimized to turn over fastest. That is the kind of read on a neighborhood I put together for clients looking at Lombard and the surrounding western suburbs every day.
If you are curious what your own home in or near downtown Lombard is worth given what is actually happening on the ground here, not just the last sale three streets over, reach out to Edgar R. Guerrero for a free home valuation. I will walk you through it block by block, the same way I just walked you through Main Street.
