What’s Next?

By Naperville Magazine
Appears in the September 2025 issue.

By Peter Gianopulos

This Naperville café is a family’s American dream

Vera Cusnir is very particular about the eggs she chooses to scramble, poach, boil, coddle, fry, and, of course, fold into the giant omelets and skillet scrambles at Next Café, her family-run breakfast-and-lunch restaurant in Naperville.

Eggs are eggs, aren’t they? Profit margins for any restaurant—let alone one that closes at 3 p.m. every day—are as thin as prosciutto cut on a flywheel slicer. So why pay a premium for farm-raised eggs shipped weekly from Little Farm on the Prairie in Morris?

Because, Cusnir says, Next Café wouldn’t exist if not for a salmon Benedict platter she enjoyed during a Florida vacation in 2018. In her native Moldova, people enjoy eggs for breakfast—along with cheese pancakes, porridge, and crêpes. But there was something about the entirety of that breakfast experience—the sunny-natured servers, charming atmosphere, the toe-curling hollandaise—that captured the appeal of her adopted home. “I was so impressed with everything,” Cusnir recalls. “I turned to my husband and said, ‘We should do something like this when we return to Illinois.’ ”

There were some false starts along the way. The couple opened—then sold—a bar called the Two Points Lounge. Then COVID hit, creating new complications. But Cusnir never lost sight of her dream. She and her husband, Valeriu, built Next Café from the studs up, doing much of the construction work with their own hands.

Next Café’s menu was created by committee, with extended family and team members from the restaurant refining each dish. It includes plenty of brunch standards—pancakes, salads, burgers, and club sandwiches—but there are surprises, too. Salmon sliders served on mini brioche buns. European-style spaghetti crêpes. And Next’s signature French toast glazed with a secret cream cheese glaze, which Cusnir insists can’t be found anywhere else.

Being a family-friendly breakfast nook, there are, of course, eggs everywhere. Six omelets. Four different skillets. And four Benedicts, including—you guessed it—a salmon Benedict offering, this one served atop a croissant rather than an English muffin. Yes, but about those eggs? Cusnir says her grade-school children have fallen in love with a good old-fashioned bacon-and-eggs breakfast. If they can tell the difference between the store-bought stuff and the farm-raised stuff, she realized her customers probably could, too.

What’s good for Cusnir’s kids are good for her neighbors. No compromises allowed. “This restaurant really is our dream, our American dream,” she says. And as it turns out, they are committed to ensuring it taste like one, too.

Photos: Vera Cusnir