10/07/2026
To our Northbrook community and Plan Commission,
First and foremost, thank you.
Thank you to everyone who showed up, spoke on our behalf, wrote letters, asked thoughtful questions, and stood beside us. Thank you to our Plan Commission for the time, care, and incredibly thoughtful questions you asked to protect the livelihood of your community and us small business owners. It was clear how seriously you take the responsibility of protecting what makes Northbrook special while planning for its future.
When we opened Bean Bar, we hoped to create more than a coffee shop. We wanted to create a third space where people could gather, connect, work, study, eat, laugh, and feel welcome.
What we never expected was what all of you would turn it into.
So many of you first walked through our doors as customers.
Customers became regulars. Regulars became friends. Friends became a community. And yesterday, you became family.
Watching so many of you show up and speak with such love and protectiveness means so much to all your neighbors at the Meadow Plaza.
We want you to know somewhere along the way, Bean Bar stopped feeling like something we owned.
It started feeling like something Northbrook owned with us.
Every morning coffee, study session, business meeting, family breakfast, celebration, and familiar āWelcome inā helped create something that cannot simply be drawn onto a blueprint.
You can build buildings. You can create housing, storefronts, and walkways. But you cannot build community simply by putting it on a plan.
Community happens when people choose a place, over and over again, until that place becomes part of their lives.
That is what all of you have done with Bean Bar and our neighbors at the Meadow Plaza.
We are not against progress. We want a beautiful, vibrant, walkable downtown. We want Meadow Plaza to thrive, and we want new families and businesses to continue choosing Northbrook.
We all simply believe the future can be built without erasing the things that already give this community its heart.
We opened Bean Bar hoping Northbrook would welcome us. We never imagined Northbrook would wrap its arms around us the way you did yesterday.
There truly arenāt words big enough to say thank you.
So weāll simply say this:
Weāre not asking anyone to choose Bean Bar over progress. Weāre asking for Bean Bar to be part of the progress.
Build the future. Just please let us all be part of it.
With all our love and gratitude,
The Bean Bar Family
(Serah, Kadir, Jose, Nina, Liz, Misha, Jigna, Edgar, Gabi, Evelio, Reece, Armando, Azra, Julian, Maya & Giancarlo)
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