Plans for a Buona Beef restaurant in Flossmoor are moving ahead.
At their Jan. 5 meeting, village plan commission members voted to recommend approval of Buona’s proposal to build a restaurant adjacent to the Meijer store at Vollmer Road and Crawford Avenue.
Plans for a Buona Beef restaurant in Flossmoor are moving ahead.
At their Jan. 5 meeting, village plan commission members voted to recommend approval of Buona’s proposal to build a restaurant adjacent to the Meijer store at Vollmer Road and Crawford Avenue.
The proposal will now be forwarded to the village board, which needs to give final approval to the plan commission’s findings and recommendations, said Scott Bugner, Flossmoor’s inspectional services administrator.
Buona Beef, a leading purveyor of one of Chicago’s most iconic sandwiches, is planning a 3,920-square-foot restaurant with a drive-through. The company is also proposing a future 4,500-square-foot retail building next to the restaurant.
Both structures would be constructed on the same outlot of the Meijer complex. The address, 19781 Crawford Ave., is just north of the existing BP gas station.
Minor changes to Buona’s proposal related to parking, aisle width and signage were recommended at the Jan. 5 meeting, Bugner said. The developer agreed to the changes, he said.
The review process for actual permitting of the restaurant can begin once the village board approves the commission’s recommendations and any other changes to the plan, Bugner said.
The Buona proposal marks the first expansion of the Meijer complex since the 192,000-square-foot store opened last June. Meijer owns and plans to develop five outlots in the area north of Vollmer Road and east of Crawford.
Flossmoor Village Manager Bridget Wachtel said in November that three of those outlots could be developed this year.
Wachtel said the proposed restaurant would be modeled after Buona’s location in Chicago’s Beverly neighborhood.
Buona bills itself as a company with long ties to the development of the Italian beef sandwich. The company’s website includes a history of Italian beef back to the 1920s, when it was mostly served at weddings. The family that owns Buona has relatives who owned some of the first Italian beef outlets in Chicago and the suburbs, the website states.
The first Buona restaurant was opened in Berwyn more than 30 years ago. The company, which now has 18 locations around the Chicago area, is still family-owned.