The storefront at 1228 N. Green St. sat empty for years after a smoking accessory shop called All About It closed in 2019. By August 2021, Flavio Munoz was already inside the building working on it, and five years of construction later, he opened his own restaurant there this summer, on the Fourth of July. The date wasn't an accident. Back in Mexico, his mother marked the same holiday from a roadside food stand, and Munoz wanted his opening day in McHenry to answer to that memory. While construction dragged on, McHenry Mayor Wayne Jett's own business, Jett's Heating and Air, sponsored a "coming soon" window banner so the block wouldn't look abandoned in the meantime. In 2023, the city kicked in a $10,000 facade grant. The result, Cantaritto's Tequila Bar & Grill, took its name from the unglazed clay pottery used to serve tequila cocktails, and its interior went with teal, coral, sea foam green and sand rather than anything you'd expect from a converted smoke shop.
"I am upgrading from a little taco stand in a little town to a nice restaurant in the U.S."
That's Munoz describing the jump. But the more interesting fact isn't the restaurant. It's the address. Nobody built a new restaurant lot in downtown McHenry this year. Every kitchen that opened in 2026 moved into a room that already existed, and that detail is quietly turning three separate downtown districts into something that functions more like one connected loop.
McHenry has always described itself as three downtowns rather than one: Green Street, Riverside Drive, and Main Street, each with its own character, linked by the McHenry Riverwalk along Boone Creek and the Fox River. For years, that meant three destinations you'd choose between on a given night. This year's pattern of reuse is what's starting to erase that choice.
An Upstairs That Used to Be Storage
On Riverside Drive, the building everyone calls The Courthouse Tavern is not new either. It dates to 1838, when it served as the original McHenry County courthouse. The ground floor already operates as a tavern, but the second floor was used for storage until Courthouse Prime opened there on February 19, 2026, serving dinner Thursday through Saturday. The building still carries a preserved space long known as the Jury Room, once used for actual jury deliberations, so the steakhouse didn't have to invent an identity. It inherited one.
That's the same math as Cantaritto's. No new construction, no new parcel, just an existing structure asked to do more than it had been doing. Two different owners, two different cuisines, one identical move: expand into square footage that was already standing.
The Shoppes Are Auditioning Downtown's Next Storefront
The clearest evidence of this pattern isn't a restaurant at all. It's the McHenry Riverwalk Shoppes, a retail incubator the McHenry Area Chamber of Commerce and the City of McHenry run at Miller Point Park along Boone Creek. Now in its fourth season, the Shoppes open small, temporary storefronts each spring and run them Friday through Sunday, giving new business owners a low-risk way to test whether a permanent downtown address makes sense before they sign a lease.
This year's ten-vendor lineup includes Jennifer Maniurka, known around the county as the Cake Lady of Spring Grove, who has spent twenty years baking out of a Johnsburg commercial kitchen and selling at farmers markets before landing a Shoppes unit this season. It also includes Tina Lawrence, whose bookstore Hello Darling is using its second Shoppes season to experiment with staying open on Tuesdays, the day the publishing industry releases new titles, specifically to see whether that changes her numbers enough to justify a permanent storefront.
Neither business is guaranteed a lease on Green Street or Riverside Drive next year. But both are doing exactly what Cantaritto's and Courthouse Prime already did: using an existing structure, however temporary, as the proving ground for something more permanent. The Shoppes aren't a side attraction to downtown McHenry's restaurant news. They're the same mechanism, running one size smaller.
A Calendar That Connects the Three Blocks
The programming along the Riverwalk has started to follow the same logic as the buildings. This past weekend, the McHenry Music Festival closed out its three-day run at Petersen Park with Shinedown, Kane Brown and Hardy headlining. On September 26, Light the Night takes over the Riverwalk itself, with fire globes lit along Boone Creek, food trucks, craft vendors and live music strung between Miller Point Park and the restaurants on either side.
That single evening does something the calendar hasn't done consistently before: it gives residents a reason to walk the entire stretch from Green Street to Riverside Drive rather than choosing one district and staying there. A few of the fixed points along that walk:
- Green Street anchors the restaurant and bar scene, now including Cantaritto's alongside longtime tenants
- Riverside Drive carries the waterfront dining, including The Courthouse Tavern and its new upstairs steakhouse
- Main Street, a short drive from the Riverwalk core, adds its own dining and small-town retail mix
None of this displaces what was already working. Plum Garden, the family-owned Chinese restaurant that Connie Moy founded in 1965, has served the McHenry County community for more than 56 years and still hand-rolls its egg rolls every morning. The new openings aren't replacing the old ones. They're filling in the gaps around them.
What's Actually Changing
Downtown McHenry didn't add square footage this year. It found a use for square footage that was sitting idle: a shuttered smoke shop, a courthouse's forgotten second floor, a row of temporary retail sheds built to test what belongs there permanently. Put together, those small decisions are doing something bigger than any one restaurant opening could. They're making three separate downtown identities start to behave like one place, connected by a creek, a handful of new addresses, and a calendar that finally asks people to walk the whole loop instead of picking a lane.
That's the kind of change that shows up slowly, one reused building at a time, until the map looks different than it did five years ago.
Team Open Doors keeps a close eye on how McHenry County neighborhoods evolve, block by block and building by building, because that context matters long before anyone's ready to make a move. When you're curious what a changing downtown means for your own address, get your free home valuation and find out where you actually stand.
