Drive past the corner of Main and Whipple on the west side of Batavia and you will see a building wrapped in plastic sheeting, a dumpster in the side lot, and a sign that has said little for more than a decade. That is 912 Main Street, the longtime home of The Elms Restaurant, closed since roughly 2014. For twelve years it has been the kind of vacancy a neighborhood stops noticing because noticing it hurts a little. This fall, that changes. Local Batavia residents bought the property and are turning it into a new sit-down restaurant called The Whip, and the way it got there says more about how Batavia actually grows than anything on the city's official events calendar.
The corner that time passed by
West Town is not downtown. It has no woonerf, no riverfront gallery district, no organization staging a monthly reason to walk its blocks. It is a residential pocket that relied on one restaurant to anchor its corner, and when The Elms closed, nothing replaced it. That kind of vacancy tends to solve itself only when someone with a personal stake in the block decides the math is worth it anyway, not when a franchise development team runs a site-selection model on the address.
That is roughly what happened here. According to reporting on the project, the new owners are Batavia residents, and the head chef grew up in the city. The plan, described in Plan Commission filings, is a neighborhood-oriented, sit-down family restaurant, not a bar. The new owners are keeping the walk-up ice cream window at the corner, the detail longtime residents will recognize before they recognize anything else about the building.
What Randall Road did instead
While Main and Whipple sat empty, the other side of town kept moving. The Randall Road corridor has spent the past several years absorbing new restaurant traffic almost continuously. Chicken Salad Chick chose a Randall Road address for its first Chicagoland location. Dave's Hot Chicken opened at 125 S. Randall Road. Acquaviva Winery and Ristorante, a longtime downtown fixture, eventually relocated its restaurant and wine bar into the corridor as well, trading a Water Street address for a larger building with an event space built for fifty guests.
None of that is a knock on Randall Road. It is simply a different growth pattern, one built on drive-by traffic counts and chain real estate logic. A corner like 912 Main never had that kind of visibility working for it. It had a decade of quiet residential foot traffic and a building nobody with a franchise spreadsheet was going to bid on. The two corridors of Batavia have been growing at different speeds for different reasons, and this fall is the first time in a while that West Town's slower one produced something visible.
| 912 Main Street (West Town) | Randall Road corridor | |
|---|---|---|
| What arrived | The Whip, a locally owned family restaurant | National and regional chains, plus relocated local restaurants |
| Who bought in | Batavia residents, chef raised in the city | Franchise operators and corridor-focused restaurant groups |
| What made it possible | A decade-long wait for a local buyer | Traffic counts and available commercial pad sites |
| Neighborhood feel kept | The corner's walk-up ice cream window | Standardized storefronts built for the highway |
What is actually going into the building
The renovation plans filed with the city give a clear picture of what the corner will look like once it reopens. The exterior is being reworked with board and batten siding in a green tone called Mountain Sage, paired with warm cedar siding under a semi-transparent stain and a stone veneer called Mission Point. The roof mixes Weathered Wood laminated asphalt shingles with dark bronze metal panels, and black metal trim frames the new windows and storefront glass. The Whip's name will sit on a wood-framed cantilevered awning over the main entrance, facing north toward Whipple.
The site itself is changing too. Filings describe:
- A new outdoor dining patio and a dedicated children's play area
- Two parking lot light poles moved further from the property line to protect the privacy of adjacent homes, with lights required to shut off within thirty minutes of closing
- Demolition of the westernmost shed and the existing trash enclosure
- Retention of the 900-square-foot detached garage and a smaller 120-square-foot shed
- City staff monitoring on-street parking along Whipple Avenue once the restaurant opens
The project cleared the Plan Commission with a unanimous recommendation before heading to a final City Council vote in May. No opening date has been announced yet, which tracks with a project still working through construction rather than a soft-launch countdown. For a corner that has waited twelve years, a few more months of scaffolding is not the part anyone in West Town is worried about.
The rest of Batavia's fall runs on a different clock
Downtown, the calendar is doing what it always does this time of year, and it is worth holding the two stories side by side. Batavia MainStreet, the nonprofit behind the newly updated 2026 Downtown Batavia Restaurant Guide featuring 35 local businesses, produces BatFest every October. This year it lands on Saturday, October 24, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., centered on the Peg Bond Center. The parade lines up at Houston Street and Island Avenue at 9:30 and steps off at 10, trick-or-treating covers more than 60 downtown businesses, and the day also carries the season's final Farmers' Market on Houston Street.
A few blocks away, Water Street Studios keeps its own rhythm going. Every second Friday from 6 to 9 p.m., the gallery hosts a new exhibit opening inside its home at 160 S. Water Street, an 1886 limestone building originally constructed for the U.S. Wind Engine and Pump Company, the manufacturer behind Daniel Halladay's self-governing windmill. The building has been an arts center since 2009, and Second Fridays remain free and open to the public.
None of that changes because of what is happening on Main Street. Sturdy Shelter Brewing still runs its Euchre Tournament on the first and third Wednesday of the month. Sidecar Supper Club still hosts Bluegrass Sunday on the North River Street woonerf. The Comedy Vault still fills its Thursday and Friday shows inside a repurposed bank vault on East Wilson. Downtown Batavia has an organization built to keep that machine running every month, in every season.
West Town does not have that machine. It has residents who noticed a corner sitting empty for over a decade and eventually did something about it themselves. That is the actual story this fall, more than any single ribbon-cutting. Batavia grows on two different clocks at once, an organized one downtown that never really stops, and a slower one in its residential pockets that depends on somebody local finally deciding the wait is over.
If you are watching what is happening on your own corner of Batavia, whether that is a restaurant reopening down the block or just curiosity about what your street looks like to a buyer these days, The Kelly Schmidt Group has spent years paying attention to exactly this kind of neighborhood detail. Reach out any time you want a local read on what is actually changing around you.
