Northwestern football fans have plenty of options when it comes to watching the game–any number of sports bars and student hangouts will tune their TVs to the Wildcats when the season starts next month. But until six months ago, finding more dignified surroundings was difficult. Then along came the restaurant-bar Bluestone, run by three lifelong Evanstonians and offering a menu that ranges from pizza to seafood, a laid-back waitstaff, a location convenient to the stadium, and plenty of comfy seating and overhead TVs.
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That commitment to families and neighbors runs deep in Enright. For the past eight years he’s owned the Candlelite, the legendary 60-year-old restaurant on Western just a block and a half south of Howard. The dingy sign out front and the large windows covered with beer signs don’t exactly scream culinary ingenuity, but anyone who grew up in neighborhoods on either side of Howard knows about the Candlelite’s French onion soup, homemade pizzas, and chicken wings. In 1994 Enright’s cousin, Jean Dileo, the Candlelite’s owner for 15 years, offered to sell him the restaurant. Enright, who’d graduated from the University of Iowa in 1985 with a film degree, had quickly found that his part-time work for Dileo was much more interesting than his day job making commercials. When his cousin made the offer, “I didn’t give it a second, I just did it,” he says. “I kept it the same, just cleaned it up.” Getting the building up to code, installing new plumbing, and reconstructing the bar would prove good training for his future project on Central Street.
Enright agreed: the street was the perfect place for a casual yet upscale neighborhood restaurant. He signed on as a partner, and after searching the listings for a few months the three found a vacant coffeehouse that seemed to fit their needs. They closed on the space (the former Bean Counter Cafe) in February 2001 and immediately began gutting it. “We took down the ceilings, removed walls, took out the existing floor,” Enright says. “It was a lot of work.” They opened their doors two weeks before Christmas.
