The Fox Hole, closed since late December, set to reopen under new management July 1

Kevin Rourke remembers going to Fox Hole Pizza and Pub as a 5-year-old.

“I have been coming here since I was in diapers,” said Rourke, of McHenry. “I have always loved this place.”

Not only did his parents bring him to the iconic downtown McHenry restaurant as a child, but his parents went there when they were little, too, Rourke said.

So when the restaurant became available earlier this year, Rourke jumped at the opportunity, reaching out to friends Rhett Wilborn and Courtney Wander to invest in the business.

On July 1, the Fox Hole is set to reopen under new management but with the same recipes used there for decades.

Rourke, along with Wilborn and Wander and their children, Ryleigh Morton and Skylar Wilborn, are taking over the restaurant that closed abruptly in late 2023.

Rhett Wilborn and his wife, Courtney Wander, had been looking for a restaurant to invest in, but they were focused on Green Street when they heard that the Fox Hole was struggling. The previous Fox Hole incarnation was shut down by the McHenry County Department of Health and the Illinois Department of Revenue in January, but the restaurant had been open intermittently since at least December.

Not long after it closed, Rourke approached them about reopening it together. He said he already had spoken to building owner Jay Bomberg about his interest. When he talked to Bomberg about taking over the business, Rourke said there were others who had shown an interest but who also wanted to change it.

“I didn’t want the Fox Hole, a staple of the town, to go away” and become something other than what it was, Rourke said.

One of the ideas was to make it a “speakeasy” sort of bar, an idea Rourke said he didn’t like.

“Thank God it will be the Fox Hole again,” he said.

Besides electrical wiring and plumbing work along with fixing a hand-washing sink, the majority of what’s been done to get the restaurant ready to reopen has been cosmetic and deep cleaning, Rhett Wilborn said.

“Once we were in here, we repainted the whole place, cleaned it up ... [along with] a minor remodel of the bathrooms,” Rhett Wilborn said.

“We took out a lot of trash,” Courtney Wander said.

They refinished the bar that dates from the 1930s, put down new flooring and replaced the formica tables and banquet chairs that had been in the restaurant since the 1970s, Rhett Wilborn said. They brought in new high-top tables, replaced the stools, took out the drop-panel ceiling and replaced it with a faux wood-and-tin design.

The recipes are the same that have been passed down since the 1960s, Rhett Wilborn said.

“The original owners had a recipe for the pizza that had been passed down and changed. [Previous owners] were not using fresh ingredients,” he said.

They plan to go back to that original recipe and add some of the other menu items that had been dropped over the years, including broasted chicken. Rourke will run the kitchen and food, and Ryleigh Morton will run the bar and restaurant floor.

The new owners plan to open seven days a week, bring back lunch hours and eventually deliver pizzas to boaters on the Fox River. The most recent section of McHenry’s Riverwalk is under construction about 300 feet from the store.

“We want to be the place for the community and family,” Rhett Wilborn said.

“We want it be what it originally was after the first owner,” Rourke said.