The West Loop has undergone the most dramatic transformation of any Chicago neighbourhood in the past three decades. What was a working meatpacking and cold-storage district west of the river — gridded with industrial warehouses and elevated truck docks — is now the densest concentration of nationally recognised restaurants in the Midwest, with Google's Chicago headquarters anchoring the tech presence that followed the food.
The change came street by street. Restaurant Row on West Randolph Street between Halsted and Ogden was the early catalyst: Girl and the Goat, Avec, Monteverde, and Au Cheval (whose cheeseburger generated years of national coverage) all opened within a few blocks of one another. The pace accelerated when Fulton Market — the actual street where meat was loaded and shipped — became the address for a second wave of restaurants and hotels. The former meatpacking infrastructure has been largely retained: the cold-storage facades, elevated loading bays, and brick warehouses now house restaurants at street level and offices above.
The Morgan and Ashland/Lake Green and Pink Line stops connect the neighbourhood to the Loop in under ten minutes. On weekend evenings the blocks around Randolph and Fulton are pedestrian-dense enough that the street-level energy approaches that of a proper restaurant district in a European city — which remains unusual for Chicago.
The neighbourhood sits immediately west of the Loop and south of the river. The United Center — home of the Bulls and Blackhawks — is about a mile further west, and the walk from Restaurant Row passes through the quieter western residential blocks.