“I’VE BEEN EATING here since I was a kid,” says 25-year-old Matthew Williford, the new owner of Illinois Street Food Emporium, one of Butler-Tarkington’s longest-standing and most familiar neighborhood spots. The native Hoosier grew up nearby in SoBro, attended Bishop Chatard, and then graduated from Purdue University. He went on to work at C-SPAN’s West Lafayette office but eventually realized he preferred community over cubicles. “It was lonely,” he admits. “I wanted to build something tangible that connected people.” In the summer of 2024, his broker notified him of an opportunity to buy the Emporium. He leapt. “I’m not changing what people love,” he says. “I’m enhancing by working with local farmers and producers. Familiar but better.”
BSince he took ownership in September 2025, his mother has started stopping by for a weekly lunch, his old high school friends have popped in to congratulate him, and he recognizes faces from the community-building efforts he organized as a teenager. “Owning a business like this is about stewardship and being a good neighbor,” says Williford, who notes that his sense of purpose deepened during the pandemic. “Covid hit when I graduated high school. It shaped how I think about isolation,” he says. “It made me realize how important places like this are.”…