A few years back, Riley Brown and Hannah Grossman adopted Dewey, a scrawny chihuahua with a wonky eye. Little did they know the impact that Dewey would have on their lives. The couple are hospitality industry vets — he’s a chef, and she’s worked in front-of-the-house
roles, including as beverage director and manager — and between them they have worked at Trenchermen, Oriole, Perman Wines, City Winery, and Monteverde, where they met. On Wednesday, September 2, they add their own spot, Dewey’s Café, to the list.
Located in Roscoe Village, the intimate daytime restaurant features seasonal plant-focused dishes alongside coffee drinks, wine, beer, and nonalcoholic beverages. Sourcing locally will be a big emphasis as will taking a thoughtful approach to food allergies and dietary restrictions. Formerly catering companyBrix, Dewey’s Café aims to be a third place of sorts that will expand its menu and hours gradually. “From the beginning, the concept was to be a place where people could hang out and escape all the craziness of the world,” says Brown.
After years of working in the stressful restaurant industry, the couple knew they needed a change. That’s when Dewey entered the picture. A few months after the loss of a previous rescue dog, Brown and Grossman felt ready to get a new one. At a shelter, they fell in love with Dewey, even though he was sick and withdrawn. After a few months of nursing him back to health, he became a completely different dog.
“It was really inspiring to see him go from being so drained, kind of like how I felt at the time, and then see how much life he now had,” says Brown. “Dewey is a big inspiration on how we perceive this concept, which is if you do things with love and care and patience you get something awesome out of it, including a little charismatic dog.”
Patience is something the couple continues to embrace with last-minute kitchen equipment snafus, including a broken freezer and electrical issues. “I got electrocuted twice but I’m okay,” Brown says. “We have a couple items we’re going to be putting out at the start, and then we plan on growing in a slow drip of items until we can go all in on a full food menu for lunch.”
For now, the focus will be on mornings with vegan doughnuts fromBeacon, a local vendor that matches the couple’s viewpoint on sustainability and allergens. There are also homemade cookies.Metric Coffee supplies the beans for the coffee drinks. In keeping with its plant-forward philosophy, oat milk will be the go-to with soy, coconut, and corn milks available at no extra cost. Local vendorVolition supplies teas. Syrups are be made in house, including one for a cold brew special topped with a peach cream foam. Sugar cube melons fromMick Klug Farms form the base for a syrup in an iced matcha drink. Beer from local brewers Middle Brown and Hopewell are also on the beverage menu.
Once the kitchen situation is fixed in the next few weeks, the lunch menu will kick in at noon with sandwiches and salads. Happy hour will follow not too long after between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. with small plates. Next year, plans are in the works to add dinner a couple nights a week. “That’s a time where we could have a bit more fun and make it a bit more upscale and lean into some of my past in fine dining places,” says Brown.
While Brown is hesitant to label the style of the food he’ll be doing at Dewey’s with seasonality playing such a prominent role and the inevitable changing of the menu that inherently will bring, he does list Italian, Indian, and French as influences. “It’s whatever will make the most sense for the ingredients at hand,” he says. “There are so many fun flavors, textures, and things you can do with vegetables that I’ve learned over the years of cooking, and I just want to show people what you can do with them.”
Take, for instance, his version of a vegetable sandwich. Cured and smoked carrots are the base. Pickled vegetables along with lettuce, cucumber, and sunflower sprouts go on next. Sunflower seeds are made into a creamy, hummus-style spread. Publican Quality Bread’s 1979 multigrain is used. “That’s the only bread we’re not making in-house because I don’t think I could make a better version of it,” says Brown. Another sandwich pairs cucumber with fresh herbs and pakora, an Indian-style fritter, while a salad mixes celery and nori.
While Brown isn’t a fan of labels, he does appreciate the cooking challenge of doing less with more, and hence the no nuts, dairy, or meat on Dewey’s menus for now. (“We want to leave it open because we’d love to do collaborations with other chefs or people in the city without them feeling restricted,” says Brown.) That perspective began early on for Brown, who grew up in a family where two of his siblings have extreme food allergies. “When we all went out to eat, we had a laundry list of things to avoid,” says Brown. While cooking at Oriole, he furthered his education on ways to create food that was just as delicious with ingredient restrictions. “I love that feeling of giving somebody that maybe felt excluded for a long time in these settings, the ability to be a part of it and not feel like they’re missing out,” he says.
After getting the space in early 2025, Brown and Grossman worked with Chicago’sSiren Betty Design to create Dewey’s cozy interior design. The former storage front area of the previous catering company has been transformed into an inviting room full of earth tones, natural woods, and plenty of plants. An intimate back area features couches and rotating artwork from local artists. From the outside, Dewey’s, which has seating for 25 with an additional eight on the patio when it launches next summer, is unassuming with a small hand-painted sign.
“We want to give people the best experience possible, but we don’t want to burn the staff out, including ourselves, or else it doesn’t feel like there’s any point in doing this,” says Brown of the gradual rollout. “We’re not trying to come out of the gates too hot and force anything. We want to make sure everybody feels safe and comfortable and happy. When you have happy people making food and drinks you can taste it.”
Dewey’s Café, 2036 W Roscoe Street; open 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Wednesday to Sunday
