La Casa del Pueblo Taqueria will leave Pilsen after Christmas and plans to reopen in Berwyn

The family-owned Mexican restaurant La Casa del Pueblo Taqueria will close the dining room at 1834 S. Blue Island Ave. in Pilsen after Christmas Day, ending about six decades in the neighborhood, and plans to reopen at 6723 W. Cermak Road in Berwyn. The restaurant announced on social media that the Pilsen location will stay open through December 25 to fill Christmas tamale orders, What Now Chicago reported on October 28, 2026.

“This is not a goodbye; we will see you over there,” the restaurant wrote in the announcement, as quoted by What Now. The announcement thanked customers for years of support and described the Berwyn location as the continuation of a 64-year run, a count that dates the business to about 1962.

The announcement, as What Now reported it, gives no opening date for the Berwyn location.

Why the restaurant is leaving Blue Island Avenue

What Now reported that the restaurant is closing the Pilsen location and relocating because of lease issues with the current landlord. The report does not describe the terms of the lease, and it includes no response from the property owner.

Cook County Assessor’s Office parcel records list Nicholas J. Lombardi as the taxpayer for 1834 S. Blue Island Ave., with the tax bill mailed to 1810 S. Blue Island Ave. The same taxpayer name appears on the parcels at 1810 S. Blue Island Ave., the address of the La Casa del Pueblo supermarket on the same block. The restaurant’s building is classed by the county as a mixed-use property with commercial space and apartments.

The move to Berwyn was public by May, when Axios Chicago included the restaurant in a roundup of Chicago businesses closing in 2026, noting the Mexican food and the colorful facade on Blue Island Avenue.

A restaurant that began inside a grocery store

Martha Saucedo and her mother, Maria Sanchez, founded the restaurant in the 1960s, and the business began inside the La Casa del Pueblo supermarket, What Now reported. After fire damaged the grocery store, the store’s owner offered Saucedo and Sanchez the space to open their restaurant, according to the What Now report, which does not give the year of the fire.

City of Chicago business license records, which go back to 2002, show the taqueria and the supermarket as separately licensed businesses on the block from the first year of the data. The taqueria held a retail food license at 1834 S. Blue Island Ave. under the name LaCasa del Pueblo Taqueria, with Martha Saucedo listed as a license holder, and renewed it each term through 2015. In May 2018 the city issued a new retail food license at the address to a company called Del Pueblo Inc., doing business as La Casa del Pueblo, and that license was renewed in 2020, 2022 and 2024.

The supermarket’s company, La Casa del Pueblo Inc., has held retail food licenses at 1810 S. Blue Island Ave. over the same span, along with tobacco and limited business licenses in earlier years. The store added a package goods liquor license in November 2023, and city records show the retail food and package goods licenses renewed in January 2026 for a term that runs through December 15, 2027.

The Infatuation’s 2024 entry on the grocery lists produce, fresh and deli meats, Mexican groceries and plant-based specialty items, and notes the cafeteria-style restaurant next door and the tamale sellers who work outside the store all year.

Tamales, tortas and a cafeteria line

A Time Out Chicago listing says the room looks less like a restaurant than a cafeteria and calls the tamales the main reason to go. Other dishes and details named in published reviews of the restaurant include these:

• Tortas de camarón, which are fried shrimp patties, appear on Time Out’s list of dishes.
• Chicharrones en salsa verde, which are pork rinds in green chile sauce, also appear on Time Out’s list.
• The pico de gallo gets a green color from jalapeño rather than cilantro, and Time Out warns that the salsa is very hot.
• Rotating daily specials come off the cafeteria-style line, according to The Infatuation.

Time Out’s interest goes back at least to 2009, when a tamale tour of Pilsen singled out the restaurant’s chicken tamale with green sauce and noted that when the writer asked for one tamale, the staff assumed the order was for a dozen.

In a 2015 Time Out Chicago roundup of Pilsen residents’ favorite neighborhood spots, then-Ald. Danny Solis of the 25th Ward put the restaurant first on his list.

The restaurant’s phone number is (312) 421-4664, according to Time Out’s listing and the listing site Restaurantji, which gives daily hours of 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. The CTA’s No. 60 Blue Island/26th bus runs along Blue Island Avenue, and the Pink Line’s 18th Street station is less than half a mile west of the restaurant.

What happens next in Pilsen and Berwyn

The move stands at these stages as of October 29, 2026, based on the restaurant’s announcement and county records:

• The Pilsen dining room stays open through December 25 and fills Christmas tamale orders until then, according to the restaurant’s announcement.
• The family plans to reopen at 6723 W. Cermak Road in Berwyn, and no opening date has been announced.
• No building permit or business license for a restaurant at the Berwyn address has been reported.
• Cook County records show Martha Saucedo bought the Berwyn building in August 2018 for $265,000.

The Berwyn property is a 2,990-square-foot retail storefront built in 1957 on a 3,250-square-foot lot, according to the Cook County Assessor’s commercial valuation data, and 2026 assessor records still list Martha Saucedo as the taxpayer for the parcel. The building is about 7 miles from the Blue Island Avenue storefront, on Cermak Road, which runs west from Pilsen through Cicero into Berwyn.

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