DOWNTOWN — A former Riverwalk restaurant is suing the city, alleging racial bias during the lease renewal process led to it being booted in favor of another business.
Robert Gomez, owner of Beat Kitchen and other popular local restaurants, secured a five-year lease in 2020 to operate Beat Kitchen along the Chicago Riverwalk. When he applied to renew the lease last year, Gomez was denied — despite turning a profit and investing about $600,000 out of pocket in infrastructure improvements, even though pandemic shutdowns allowed him to operate for only three of the five years, he said.
In May, Gomez held a press conference criticizing the city’s vendor selection process, which he said was shrouded in secrecy as he received no explanation for why his lease renewal was denied.
The city eventually announced that Haire’s Gulf Shrimp, a Black-owned business from the South Side, would take over the space.
In a 43-page federal civil rights lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court last week, Beat Kitchen alleges city officials privately solicited and accepted a late proposal, manipulated evaluation scores and considered race as a positive factor when awarding the Riverwalk vendor spot — even though Beat Kitchen was the only vendor to submit a timely, complete proposal for that site.
The lawsuit also claims the city violated the U.S. Constitution’s Equal Protection and Due Process clauses, federal civil rights law, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, the Illinois Constitution and Chicago’s own municipal code. A Latino-owned business, Gomez’s Beat Kitchen was one of the few minority-owned vendors on the Riverwalk.
“As a minority-owned business, Beat Kitchen supports the City’s stated commitment
to equity — equity grounded in transparency, consistent rules and lawful process — that is, genuine equity,” according to the lawsuit. “What Beat Kitchen cannot support — and what federal and state law forbid but took place — is the substitution of race-influenced directives and considerations for the rule-based evaluation required by law.”
Documents submitted with the lawsuit show Haire’s originally submitted a proposal for a smaller location along the Riverwalk; however, documents indicate officials wanted to see if the shrimp restaurant would be interested in the larger location home to Beat Kitchen.
The lawsuit alleges city officials broke Chicago’s vendor procurement rules by privately reaching out to Haire’s and inviting the business to submit a proposal after the Riverwalk application deadline.
“That’s all they wanted, was this tiny kiosk. … It’s the head of the committee reaching out to them saying, ‘Hey, you should get this location. Give us a proposal after the deadline.’ That’s insane. I mean, this is breaking every single rule that they’re told they cannot do,” Gomez told Block Club.
Beat Kitchen is seeking to void the concession award and block the contract with Haire’s Gulf Shrimp, and to recover monetary damages, according to court documents.
Haire’s owner, Aisha Murff, declined to comment when reached by phone.
Murff inherited the restaurant from her husband, Finnie Haire, after he died in 2021, according to the Sun-Times. All of the recipes were passed down from Haire’s mother and are a “family trade secret,” Murff previously told Crain’s.
To learn how to run the business, Murff enrolled in the FoodLab Chicago program through the Greater Chatham Initiative. She completed the six-month program in 2023 and told the Sun-Times it helped her develop a website and implement online ordering. As a result, Haire’s business has increased by about 15 percent since completing the program, she told the paper.
Murff opened a second location earlier this year in the South Loop. Haire’s has received high-profile recognition and Chance the Rapper was a regular at its Englewood location.
Beat Kitchen alleges in its lawsuit that race was improperly considered during the city’s evaluation process and that city officials altered standard procurement rules to favor Haire’s.
The Mayor’s Office did not respond to an immediate request for comment on the lawsuit.
According to the complaint, internal evaluation records show city staff explicitly referenced Haire’s race while discussing the concession award. In one internal scorecard, a city employee wrote that it “would be great to get a Black woman-owned business,” the lawsuit alleges.
Gomez said Haire’s Gulf Shrimp was named in the lawsuit only because it was awarded the Riverwalk concession contract, not because the business or its owner engaged in any wrongdoing. He said he does not fault the company for applying after being contacted by the city and stressed that the lawsuit targets the city’s vendor-selection process, not Haire’s or its owner.
“It’s about reform,” Gomez said. “It’s about our public land being managed in a fair and transparent way. That’s what this is about. Race is a piece of it because of the comments they made in the evaluation process.”
Beat Kitchen further alleges city evaluators inflated Haire’s application scores even though the late proposal was missing required financial and legal documents, while Beat Kitchen’s proposal offered more than $1.3 million in projected compensation to the city over the life of the contract.
The complaint also points to Johnson’s public statements and policy initiatives, citing a broader city effort to prioritize Black-owned businesses and Black Chicagoans in contracting and economic opportunities.
Beat Kitchen argues those preferences, which the mayor has publicly described as part of his administration’s “equity and reparations agenda,” improperly influenced the Riverwalk concession decision.
Gomez said whether he ultimately returns to the Riverwalk is up to the city, but he would seek the location again if the process were restarted, which is one goal of the lawsuit.
“I think once we change administrations, my opportunity will increase significantly,” Gomez said.
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