In 2003, Lisa Santos opened Southport Grocery & Cafe at 3552 N. Southport Ave. as a lunch-and-dinner spot, and after every shift customers asked her for breakfast. She told Block Club Chicago that she held out at first: "But after one guy ordered two orders of the bread-pudding pancakes and ate them both, I knew we had to switch."
Twenty-three years later, the pancakes are still on the menu and the cafe has about nine weeks left. Santos said on Instagram on Saturday, Oct. 17, that Southport Grocery will close at the end of 2026. Dollop Coffee Co. will open a new concept in the space called Dollop Finer Diner.
The breakfast-and-lunch business at 3552 N. Southport carries over to the new restaurant in most of the ways that count. What ends at the close of the year is the grocery half of the name: the jars, the preserves program and the shelves.
The partnership was in place four years before the announcement
Dollop is not a stranger walking into an empty storefront. Block Club reports that Santos partnered with Dollop "a little more than four years ago" to grow its wholesale pastry operation. CBS Chicago, working from Santos's announcement video, puts the start at three years ago. Either way, the two businesses had been working together for years. Dollop cold brew is already on the Southport Grocery menu.
The name matters too. Some early reports said "Dollop Diner" was moving in, which is the name of Dollop's existing restaurant in Andersonville. Block Club reports the Southport restaurant will be a new concept, Dollop Finer Diner. So the incoming restaurant is a new format built for this address, not a copy of the Clark Street diner.
Who keeps what after December
Block Club's reporting lays out how the pieces divide, and the split favors continuity more than the "closing" headline suggests.
| Piece of the business | Where it goes |
|---|---|
| Longtime staff | Jobs at Dollop Finer Diner |
| Lisa Santos | A small stake in Dollop Finer Diner, plus consulting and taste-testing |
| The Southport Grocery name | Stays with Santos |
| The recipes | Stay with Santos |
| A new Southport Grocery storefront | Not planned. Santos said her next chapter won't include another brick-and-mortar restaurant |
The staff line stands out most. Santos told Block Club:
"I have people that have worked for me for 18 years. They all have jobs at the new concept. They all have a soft landing."
So the cooks, the servers, a partner who has worked with Dollop's pastry operation for years, and the founder's palate as a taste-tester all stay at 3552 N. Southport. The sign changes. The neighborhood breakfast spot on that corner continues.
What the Andersonville diner suggests, and where that comparison ends
Dollop started as a small cafe in Uptown in 2005. Under Dan Weiss it grew into a citywide group of cafes that roasts its own coffee and bakes in-house, according to Southport Corridor Chicago. The same site reports that Dollop gives its locations different designs and menus instead of making them identical.
The full-service model is newer for the company. DNAinfo covered the Andersonville Dollop Diner at 5060 N. Clark St. at the end of June 2017, days before it opened. Its opening menu included pancakes, chicken and waffles, donuts made fresh daily, pork sliders, fried-chicken sandwiches, salads and a burger. Today the Dollop Diner site describes locally sourced classic American food, locally roasted coffee and craft batched cocktails, served daily from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.
That is a useful reference point, but only that. Dollop hasn't announced an opening date, menu, hours or any changes to the space for Southport. With a different name, the same staff and Santos tasting the food, the Andersonville menu shows the company's habits more than it predicts what Southport will serve.
The farewell calendar, from now through December
Until it closes, Santos told Block Club, customers can expect business as usual, and a few retired favorites are coming back. As of this week, here is what's posted, roughly in date order:
- Every day through the end of the year: the cafe stays open daily from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.
- Returning menu items: apple-stuffed French toast and the kitchen's version of a Hostess Ding Dong, both brought back by customer request.
- Friday, Nov. 13, at 7 p.m.: a Secret Supper, listed on the Southport Grocery shop page.
- Thanksgiving, Thursday, Nov. 26: Thanksgiving catering is on the list of what continues until closing.
- December: a second and final Secret Supper. The date hasn't been posted.
- Through the holidays: Christmas cookies, gift baskets, and the holiday gift boxes and house-made preserves in the online shop, including European plum, apricot and pickled green tomato.
The last day hasn't been announced. "End of the year" is as precise as the reporting gets. Weekend lines were a regular part of the cafe for years, and the bread pudding pancakes and chorizo and eggs drove them, according to Southport Corridor Chicago. A farewell visit on a weekday morning in November is likely to be calmer than the last Saturday in December.
The half of the business with no next address
The restaurant has a successor. The grocery doesn't, and the grocery is what Santos spent the most years building.
When she opened in 2003, a Chicago Tribune feature described a 24-seat cafe paired with a specialty grocery. CBS Chicago reports the building was once Cooney Funeral Home. Two years after opening, the cafe was featured on WTTW's "Check, Please!" Block Club reports the staff would track re-airings to get ready for each new wave of customers, and that exposure helped Santos expand to the second floor, where the bakery ran.
The preserves came later, during the financial crisis. Santos told Block Club she wanted to keep the grocery stocked with quality products without shipping them in from elsewhere. That program now makes more than 40 items and employs a full-time preservationist. In her announcement video, Santos sat in front of a framed board listing the house preserves year by year, from 2019 through 2025.
Santos owns the recipes and the name, so the preserves could come back in some form. No one has announced that the retail line will continue after the cafe closes, and the current shop listings say nothing past this season. The cafe's cooks have a confirmed next kitchen at Dollop Finer Diner. The jars of pickled green tomato have no announced life past this season. For a Lakeview household that has stocked its pantry from those shelves, the holiday gift boxes and preserves are the time-limited part of this goodbye.
Storefront handoffs like this one change how a block like Southport feels day to day, and they're part of what Andy Ogorzaly watches along the corridor. If you're curious what's coming to your stretch of Lakeview, or want to talk through what a change like this means for your building or block, let's connect.
