Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises President R.J. Melman buys Near North Side condo for $6M

Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises President R.J. Melman and his wife, Katherine, paid $6 million in late November to buy a 7,000-square-foot, full-floor condominium on the 16th floor of a Near North Side building.

Melman is the son of the restaurant firm’s founder, Rich Melman. R.J. Melman was named Lettuce Entertain You’s president in 2017.

On the Near North Side, the four-bedroom condo that the Melmans bought had been listed in September 2021 for $9.99 million. Its asking price was lowered to $8.25 million in March 2022, and it was taken off the market in mid-October, shortly before the condo sold. The listing agent, Robby Baum, told Elite Street that he was not involved in the sale, which technically means that the deal was an off-market transaction.

With interior design by Nate Berkus’ firm, the condo has six bathrooms, wide plank French oak floors, 100 linear feet of floor-to-ceiling windows with motorized shades, cantilevered terraces, a study with custom millwork, a De Giulio kitchen with a more than 20-foot island and a butler’s pantry. Other features include large gallery walls and a primary bedroom suite with a walk-in closet.

The sellers were Ilan Shalit, who co-founded global market-making firm Consolidated Trading, and his wife, Rebekah. The Shalits created the full-floor condo by combining two separate condos. They paid $3.87 million in 2010 for the larger of the two units, and they paid $1.4 million in 2013 for the other unit on the floor.

The Melmans bought the condo through a Delaware limited liability company. However, on a publicly recorded, $4 million mortgage that the couple assumed for the condo — and their lender is Rich Melman — the couple are listed as that Delaware LLC’s owners and managers.

The condo’s two pieces together had a combined $93,530 property tax bill in the 2021 tax year.

R.J. Melman did not respond to a request for comment.

The full-floor condo isn’t the only high-priced home in or near downtown Chicago that R.J. and Katherine Melman own. In October 2020, they paid $4.8 million to buy a five-bedroom, 8,098-square-foot vintage mansion on the Gold Coast from power couple Ken Williams, who is the Chicago White Sox’s executive vice president, and his wife, former TV news anchor Zoraida Sambolin. Williams and Sambolin subsequently paid $1.85 million in March 2021 for a 29th-floor condo in a Gold Coast tower.

Separately, through an opaque land trust, Ilan and Rebekah Shalit paid $12.1 million in 2018 for a full-floor unit in a Near North Side condo building.

Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.

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