3-Dec-14 – BIN 36 will keep its name and focus on wine when it moves to the West Loop next year but its current owner says there will be changes to the “feel and vibe” of the space.

The restaurant’s last day in River North is December 20, exactly 15 years to the day after it opened in 1999 on the Dearborn Street side of Marina City.

Dan Sachs says his rent was going to double if he stayed. A 20-year lease he signed in 1999 gave him a fixed rent amount for 15 years but after that he would have to start paying a market rate.

Opening in April, the new restaurant will be located at 161 North Jefferson Street in space that was previously a restaurant named Province that closed in November 2013.

The new BIN 36 will have 6,000 square feet of interior space and 2,000 square feet outdoors. They have an option to lease an adjacent 2,000 square feet, which would bring the total area to 10,000 square feet, just 1,500 square feet smaller than the current location.

Sachs’s role in BIN 36 will evolve. Currently the sole owner of BIN 36, he will license the name and concept to his current wine director, 31-year-old Enoch Shully, who will be the sole owner of the new restaurant.

“In this new entity, Enoch is the main guy,” says Sachs. “I’ll be there, helping him. But it’s really his show.”

Shully replaced wine director Brian Duncan, who was one of three original partners of BIN 36. The third partner, David Schneider, has since moved to Phoenix and is no longer involved with the restaurant.

“The one reality is that dining continues to evolve,” says Sachs (left). “Food tastes evolve. And so the opportunity is to update all those things, update the décor, update the food to bring it into a more contemporary light.”

(Above) Marina City and neighborhood in 2006.

Upscale neighborhood shuts out independent operators

Smaller, independent restaurant operators, believes Sachs, who cannot spread costs over multiple units, have all been forced out by a neighborhood becoming increasingly upscale.

“If you look around River North and exclude bars, like Mother Hubbard’s, everything is multi-unit. There are no independent restaurants here.”

He says early in the year they had “reasonable conversations” with the property owner, LaSalle Hotel Properties, a real estate investment trust based in Bethesda, Maryland, but after awhile “it was just clear…we were just way too far apart.”

“They want to lease this out to a multi-unit national restaurant company. They don’t want an independent restaurant here, which is fine. They just want a stable tenant that’s got good credit and will pay high rent.”

Though multiple-unit businesses dominate the neighborhood now, River North was once a refuge for independents.

“The reason we were attracted to River North early on was because it was sort of independent at the time. And it’s just not that way anymore. It’s just not. And it’s not going back to that. You’ve got Eataly. You’ve got mass commercialization entertainment venues. It’s just not going back.”

(Above) Dining area at back of restaurant.

LaSalle owns the 353-room hotel in the building, Hotel Chicago, which was formerly known as Hotel Sax and before that it was a House of Blues hotel. Since LaSalle purchased the hotel in 2006, they have hired four different companies to manage it.

Room service revenue with the hotel eroded over the years. What was once more than $1 million in business per year is now closer to $200,000.

“When you have significant transition in management companies,” he says, “that created a lot of inability for us to generate any kind of programming between the restaurant and the hotel.”

No shortage of wine or wine drinkers

Wine production and consumption in the United States, says Sachs, is still “extraordinarily robust.”

According to The Wine Institute, the average adult in the U.S. drinks 2.82 gallons of wine per year, an amount that has increased every year since 2001.

One thing that has changed is the perception of wine by the glass.

“In 2000, wine-by-the-glass was considered a dirty word. When you were too cheap to order a bottle you got a glass of wine. Whereas now you can go to any decent restaurant and they typically have great wine by the glass. And I like to think BIN 36 contributed in some small way locally to that trend where people felt like wine by the glass didn’t have to be crappy and didn’t have to be inaccessible or expensive.”

(Above) BIN 36 following a renovation in 2010.

An annual Champaign tasting event, Bubble Bath, is still scheduled for December 10. BIN 36 has to be out of its space at Marina City by midnight on December 22.

Everything must go. Restaurant equipment companies will have first pick from the kitchen and dining areas. Sachs’s employees will get some items. As for the general public wanting a table, chair, or bar stool – says Sachs, “Make me an offer.”

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