[UPDATE] Fire At Old Town Social

By Anthony Todd in Food on Mar 17, 2013 9:15PM

Old Town Social, Chef Jared Van Camp's restaurant in, naturally, Old Town, is the second casualty of a restaurant fire this week. News started spreading all over social media about half an hour ago that the roof was on fire. The fire is out, but no news about damage yet.

We first heard about the fire from DC Crenshaw, who tweeted that he noticed the fire. Many, many more tweets followed. From Greg Corner: "Oh my god! Old town social is on fire. Just escaped it. I hope everyone else did." The photo is from Corner's instagram feed. OTS was open for business at the time of the fire, so we hope that everyone was evacuated.

The Sun-Times reports that police and ambulances are on the scene and that the fire has been extinguished. No injury reports yet. We've reached out to the OTS folks and we'll keep you updated.

Update (3/18): The fire, thankfully, turned out to be smaller than it originally looked. According to an OTS representative, they have been doing some roofing work and some flammable materials were left near the chimney. The damage to the restaurant was mostly fire and water, and they were able to re-open Sunday night for business.