On a Wednesday night in September, the corner of Bonita and D Street sounds like a small concert. Wanderlust Trio plays acoustic rock and country on the patio at Chase's, the fire pit throws enough light to read a menu by, and half the tables are regulars who know to ask for the corner near the copper bar. Nobody out there is thinking about square footage. But the reason this scene exists at all, and the reason it is about to exist in a second city, has everything to do with how much room Old Town actually has.
Chase's did not start as a restaurant. It started in a backyard.
A Backyard Grill, Twenty Years in the Making
Before there was a lease on Bonita Avenue, there was Chris Gendreau, spending roughly two decades experimenting with oak-fired grilling in his own yard, chasing a specific flavor that comes from burning Paso Robles red oak slow and hot. His wife, Susan Wickman, had spent years managing restaurants and bars and saw what the backyard hobby could become with a kitchen, a bar, and a building. In 2012, they opened Chase's La Verne inside a building most residents know for something else entirely: the old University of La Verne Bookstore, at 2079 Bonita Avenue, right at the northwest corner of Bonita and D.
The bones of that origin story are still the point of the place. The wood-fire grill sits at the center of the kitchen. The patio wraps around a fire wall and custom fire pit seating built specifically to let people sit outside on cool Inland Empire nights. The bar top is copper, a small detail that shows up in nearly every online review as the thing people remember. Chase's own site notes it was voted Best Date Night by the community in 2023, and if you have had a reservation there on a Friday, that tracks.
The Handoff Nobody Announced
Here is the part fewer people know. Gendreau and Wickman are not running Chase's anymore. At some point after building the restaurant into a fixture, they stepped back and handed it to their longtime general manager, Dori Franco, and her husband Sean. That is not a dramatic story and it was not treated like one. There was no farewell tour, no closing-weekend announcement. The people who had been running the floor and the books for years simply kept doing it, now as owners instead of employees.
That kind of quiet succession is worth noticing precisely because it is quiet. A lot of Old Town's long-running businesses live or die on continuity, on the same faces greeting the same regulars for over a decade. Chase's found a way to change hands without changing anything a customer would feel.
The Second Concept Hiding in Plain Sight
If you have ever grabbed a breakfast sandwich from EggSactly by Chase's, you have already eaten at Chase's without realizing it. EggSactly operates out of the same Bonita Avenue address, serving breakfast daily from 7:30 to 11 a.m., built around the same small-plates philosophy as the dinner menu but scaled down to eggs, sandwiches, and the kind of food you want before a full day of errands. It is not a food truck side hustle. It is a second, fully formed concept sharing a roof with the first.
Put those two pieces together and Chase's stopped being one restaurant a while ago. It became a small local group operating two brands out of one storefront in Old Town.
Why the Next Move Has to Happen Somewhere Else
This is where the geography of Old Town starts to matter more than it usually gets credit for. The district is not a shopping center with pad sites waiting to be filled. It is a compact strip of repurposed early-1900s buildings clustered around D and Third Streets, next to the University of La Verne campus, home to more than a dozen restaurants inside a footprint you can walk end to end in about fifteen minutes. Chase's own building used to be a college bookstore. Down the street, other Old Town restaurants occupy former storefronts that have been retail spaces for a century.
That is exactly what gives Old Town its character. It is also exactly what puts a ceiling on how big any single business inside it can get. There is no vacant lot next to Chase's where a second dining room could go up. There is no strip-mall shell sitting empty and waiting for a growing restaurant to move in. When a business here needs more physical space than the historic footprint can offer, expanding in place is not really an option. Expanding somewhere else is the only version of growth available.
So this spring, Chase's announced its first expansion in the brand's history, and it is not down the block. It is in downtown Glendora, at 216 North Glendora Avenue.
What's Actually Opening in Glendora
Reporting on the Glendora location came from two outlets tracking Los Angeles-area restaurant openings, one in April and a follow-up in May, and both noted the same thing at the time: no firm opening date had been confirmed. Early video the ownership team shared showed what looked like both an indoor dining room and an outdoor patio space, suggesting the Glendora spot was being built to carry the same dual indoor-outdoor identity that defines the La Verne original. On social media, the team behind the move wrote about wanting to "become part of the local vibe" in Glendora, which is a modest way of describing what amounts to a real bet on a second city. Chase's own site has since posted a Glendora-specific menu page alongside the La Verne one, a sign the opening is close even if no announcement has formally confirmed a date.
The detail that matters most for La Verne readers: this is not just the dinner concept moving west. EggSactly is going to Glendora too, according to the brand's own site listing a Glendora address for the breakfast concept alongside its existing La Verne hours. The whole two-concept model that took over a decade to build out of one Bonita Avenue address is being replicated as a package, not piece by piece.
| Chase's La Verne (original) | Chase's Glendora (new) | |
|---|---|---|
| Address | 2079 Bonita Avenue | 216 N. Glendora Avenue |
| Opened | 2012 | Announced spring 2026, opening date not yet confirmed |
| Concepts on site | Dinner, lunch, weekend brunch, plus EggSactly breakfast | Dinner concept plus EggSactly breakfast |
| Ownership | Dori and Sean Franco | Same ownership group |
Old Town Isn't Losing Anything
None of this means the flagship is winding down. If anything, the live music calendar on Bonita Avenue has only gotten busier. Through the end of September, Chase's is running live acts every Wednesday from 7:30 to 10:30 p.m. and Saturday from 8:30 to 11:30 p.m., with a rotating lineup that has included Wanderlust Trio, FunkD Martini, Brant Cotton, and Time Fighters this month alone. That is a restaurant investing in its home base at the same time it is opening a second one elsewhere, which is a fairly specific signal. Growth here did not come from La Verne running out of customers. It came from La Verne running out of room.
That is the version of this story worth knowing if you live in Old Town and have eaten at Chase's a dozen times without thinking much about where the building came from. The corner of Bonita and D looks the same as it always has. What changed is everything happening around that corner, in a building that started as a bookstore, run by people who started as employees, serving a menu that started in someone's backyard. Old Town's charm is that nothing here looks like it was built to scale up. Its limitation is the same thing.
If you're curious what else is shifting inside Old Town's small footprint, or you're weighing whether a walkable historic district like this one fits how you actually want to live, Camden McKay Realty knows these blocks well enough to talk through it in plain terms. Reach out to Michael and Lisa Mucino to schedule a free neighborhood consultation or sign up for local market updates.
