Two New Storefronts Opened in Lake Geneva This Year. The Third One Explains Why It Took So Long.

"We're going to open our doors and windows to the park, we want it to mesh together." That's Tom Hartz, describing the mixed-use campus his company wants to build on Sheridan Springs Road, next to Hillmoor Park. He said it back in June, when the project still didn't have a construction date. It still doesn't. But this month it cleared a milestone that took the better part of a year to reach, and understanding why tells you something the two other big openings of 2026 don't.

Three gaps in daily life around Geneva Lake got attention this year: a full breakfast on the water, a place to buy organic groceries without leaving town, and a gathering space near Hillmoor Park that's been an empty lot for longer than most people can place. Two of those gaps closed within a few months, funded privately and opened on a schedule the businesses set themselves. The third is still working its way through City Hall, and the pace difference isn't incidental. It's the whole story.

The Breakfast Room That Opened at Harbor Shores

Lakefront dining around here tends to start later in the day. A lot of the good rooms don't open their doors until lunch, which leaves an early riser with a paper map of gas station coffee. Emmi's, which opened this year at 300 Wrigley Drive inside Harbor Shores, runs Wednesday through Sunday from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m., which means it covers the exact stretch of morning that used to have nothing.

The menu leans into Wisconsin diner and supper club territory: Norwegian waffles, a bratwurst Benedict, burgers, walleye, steak frites, ribs, fish and chips, and a Friday fish fry. Every table faces the water, there's a covered deck for when the weather cooperates, and the restaurant offers free reserved parking, which removes one of the actual friction points of a downtown weekend. Wednesday through Friday at 7 a.m. is the quiet window, before the rest of downtown gets moving.

Emmi's didn't need a zoning hearing to open. A business took over a space at Harbor Shores, set its own hours, and started serving. That's worth sitting with for a second, because the next gap didn't close that way.

The Grocery Run That Used to Mean a Longer Drive

Natural Grocers opened its doors on June 10, 2026, at 600 N. Edwards Blvd. in Geneva Commons. It's the chain's first Wisconsin location, which is a detail that matters less for the novelty and more for what it put on the shelf: certified organic produce, natural and organic pantry staples, body care products, supplements, and bulk goods, all inside city limits.

For a rental week, that's the stop that saves you from driving out for the six things you realize you forgot roughly four minutes after unpacking. For a full-time resident, it's a category of shopping that previously meant planning around a longer trip. Like Emmi's, this was a company deciding to open a store, signing a lease, and doing it. No plan commission vote required.

The Vacant Corner by Hillmoor Park

Then there's Sheridan Springs Road, near the Hillmoor Park property, where a stretch of land has stayed empty while two entirely private projects opened around it. This one has taken longer, and the timeline explains why.

In January, the Lake Geneva City Council narrowly approved a proposal from the Simple Food Group, the company behind Simple Cafe and Simple Bakery & Market, to buy roughly 11 acres of city-owned land next to Hillmoor Park for about $750,000. Mayor Todd Krause cast the tie-breaking vote. Tom Hartz, who runs Simple Food Group and served as Lake Geneva's mayor from 2018 to 2020, presented concept plans to the Plan Commission that April. By June, he was back in front of the council asking for more time. The closing deadline moved from July 20 to the end of the year, because the city, as Hartz put it at the time, wanted to be responsible for the land and wanted the project to be the best it could be for the community.

On July 20, the Plan Commission unanimously approved a general development plan for the site. Then, earlier this month, the City Council approved that same general development plan, roughly eight months after the land deal itself was struck. The proposed campus would include:

• A bakery production facility, giving the company more room to expand what it already makes at its current Broad Street location
• A cafe and coffee shop
• An event space with an underground parking lot, intended for concerts and community programming
• A catering kitchen and food laboratory
• A 30-unit apartment building

Company representative Young Cho described the vision to the Plan Commission this way: "The entire space is really designed to be a discovery." Not everyone on the commission was fully sold on the scope. One member who sat on the commission at the time of the proposal raised a concern that the plan might be over-programmed for the site, a reasonable question for a parcel that size carrying a bakery, a cafe, an event center, and housing all at once.

Shovels still aren't in the ground. The general development plan approval is a real step, but it's a step in a sequence that still has more meetings ahead of it before construction starts. Hartz said as much back in June, when he described having gotten through three of what he expected to be around ten public meetings total.

What the Gap in Timing Actually Tells You

Emmi's and Natural Grocers solved their gaps on a private company's calendar. The Hillmoor Park site is solving its gap on a municipal one, because the land itself came from the city, which means every step from concept plan to general development plan to eventual building permits runs through public meetings, votes, and the kind of extended deadlines that a private lease never requires. That's not a criticism of the pace. It's the actual mechanism. A company buying a vacant commercial unit from a private landlord answers to its own schedule. A company buying land from the city it once ran answers to the calendar of everyone else in the room, including commissioners who think the plan might be trying to do too much on one parcel.

Nine months from land purchase to a fully approved plan is not unusual for a project this size, especially one requiring a walking connection to an existing park and a mixed-use zoning fit. What it does mean is that the corner by Hillmoor Park will likely stay a construction site, not a finished building, well into next year. If chamber music and jazz concerts in that underground event space are part of the plan Cho described, they're still a ways off. The breakfast room and the grocery store already opened. The gathering space is the one still working its way through the queue, and now you know why.

If you're weighing what a changing block or a still-developing parcel means for a property you already own on Geneva Lake, or you're trying to read a listing against what's actually happening a few blocks away, Bob Webster has spent more than 40 years watching this town's map shift one storefront, one land deal, and one council vote at a time. Reach out for a confidential conversation about what it means for your corner of the lake.