Walk the ground floor of 15 East Oak on any afternoon and you are walking past Balenciaga and Cartier. Six floors up, the top of that building has been sitting empty since Barneys New York closed in 2019. The restaurant that occupied it — Fred's, a well-known dining room with sweeping views of the city — went dark when the chain folded. For Gold Coast residents who knew that space, the view from the sixth floor has been inaccessible for the better part of a decade.
That changes this summer when ARLA opens on the same floor.
The opening is covered in Crain's Chicago Business and confirmed by a liquor license application filed earlier this spring under the name Arla for 15 E. Oak Street, Floor 6. The group behind it has not announced an exact date as of late May 2026, but a summer debut is on record. If you live in this neighborhood, this is worth understanding before the reservation line opens — because what is returning to that rooftop is not a replica of what was there before.
What ARLA Actually Is
The restaurant is 8,500 square feet across the entire top floor, with 230 seats inside and 60 more split across two open-air terraces. One terrace looks down Oak Street toward Lake Michigan. The other faces Rush Street. Floor-to-ceiling windows frame the skyline and the lake from inside the dining room. The design was handled by LG Group and its in-house studio Offshoot Creative, the same firm behind Itoko, Rose Mary, and Pizzeria Portofino.
The kitchen is led by Chef/Partner Soo Ahn. The menu at ARLA moves away from the steakhouse framework he used at Adalina Prime and into seaside Mediterranean cuisine with Japanese technique: fresh seafood, vegetarian dishes, live-fired hearth proteins, and a sushi and raw bar. Chicago Food Magazine describes the concept as "seaside Mediterranean cuisine with Japanese influences, anchored by fresh seafood, vegetarian dishes, live-fired hearth proteins, and curated sushi and raw bar selections." A full menu has not been released.
The restaurant operates under Hospitality Included, a new collective the group formalized alongside the ARLA announcement. Partners include Phil Siudak, Matt Deichl, Miles Muslin, and Jonathan Gillespie alongside Ahn. Think of it as the infrastructure being built to hold more than one concept — Adalina Italian in the Gold Coast since 2021, Adalina Prime in the West Loop since September 2025, and now ARLA.
Adalina Prime opened in Fulton Market last fall and landed immediately on Robb Report's list of America's Most Beautiful New Restaurants for 2025. That credential matters here not as decoration but as evidence that this group has the operational depth to run a destination-level dining room. ARLA is a larger and more exposed bet than either Adalina location — a rooftop with terraces in a neighborhood where the weather has opinions — and the group has earned the right to make it.
Why This Team, Why This Block
Hospitality Included did not come to the Gold Coast as an outside group looking to plant a flag. Adalina Italian has operated in this neighborhood for four years. The new restaurant's address is, as Siudak put it in the official announcement:
"just steps from where our group began."
That is a description of actual geography, not a positioning statement. The corner of Oak and Rush is where this group learned what Gold Coast dinner service looks like at 8 p.m. on a Friday. They know the pace of the room, the clientele, and what it takes to hold a table through a long evening in this part of the city.
That local footing is what separates ARLA from the standard rooftop-with-a-view concept. The nearby dining corridor — Gibson's Bar & Steakhouse, Hugo's Frog Bar & Fish House, Tavern on Rush — runs on institutional loyalty built across decades. A new restaurant breaks through that gravity only when it brings something the corridor cannot offer and when the people running it understand the neighborhood's baseline. ARLA has both: a vantage point no existing Gold Coast restaurant currently provides, and a team with four years of operating history one block away.
The Rest of the Summer Calendar
ARLA anchors the season, but it is not the only addition to the Gold Coast's summer picture. Here is what is new or returning between now and September.
| What | When | Where | Details |
|---|---|---|---|
| ARLA | Summer 2026 (date TBD) | 15 E. Oak St., Floor 6 | Follow @arlachicago for reservation updates |
| Water Tower Place Night Market | July 9–Sept. 24, Thursdays 4–8 p.m. | 835 N. Michigan Ave., 4th floor | New addition this year; runs rain or shine indoors |
| Oak Street Beach | Memorial Day through Labor Day | 1000 N. Lake Shore Dr. | Volleyball tournaments, chair rentals, Oak Street Beach Café |
| Jazzin' at the Shedd | May 27–Sept. 2 | Shedd Aquarium | Evening jazz series; ticketed |
The night market at Water Tower Place is worth flagging separately from the returning Oak Street Beach season. Block Club Chicago confirmed the launch in May 2026: the market runs Thursday evenings on the fourth floor of the mall, July 9 through September 24. That format — weeknight, indoors, in a building Gold Coast residents already pass — fills a gap that Saturday-morning farmers markets in Printers Row and Daley Plaza don't touch.
Oak Street Beach operates on its usual rhythm. Volleyball tournaments run through the summer, the Oak Street Beach Café handles food and drinks along the sand, and Lakefront Trail access runs directly behind the beach for cyclists and runners. Water temperature at Oak Street typically stays in the low-to-mid 60s Fahrenheit through June before climbing toward the low 70s by mid-July — swimmable by any practical definition by the second half of the season.
What This Adds Up to for People Who Actually Live Here
The Gold Coast does not need new restaurants to justify itself. The address has carried for a long time on what is already there. What the neighborhood has lacked since 2019 is the specific thing Fred's provided: a dining room where you could look out at the lake from a rooftop table and feel like you were somewhere particular, not somewhere generic.
Hotel rooftops and retail courtyards approximate that experience. ARLA is a dedicated restaurant built to deliver it. That is a meaningful difference for residents who use this neighborhood for the kind of evening where the address carries weight — a client dinner, a birthday in July, the sort of occasion where you want the room to do some of the work.
The convergence of ARLA's opening, the new Thursday night market, and Oak Street Beach's returning season does not transform the Gold Coast. What it does is give this summer a density of new options that the last few have not had. For residents who already know every table in this neighborhood, that is the actual news.
Understanding what is arriving in a neighborhood — and what it signals for the block's trajectory — is part of what Vergis Eiland brings to every buyer and seller conversation on the Gold Coast. Request your free home valuation and get market context that goes beyond the listing price.
