Muhājir Restaurant Chicago Chef Zubair Mohajir

Muhājir Is Chicago’s Most Anticipated Immigrant Story

Zubair Mohajir’s new restaurant turns migration, spice routes, and live-fire cooking into one of this year’s biggest openings.

By Jamie Dutton
6:04 a.m. ET, July 1, 2026

AUTHOR BIO: With family across the Midwest and a job that has her constantly in airports, Jamie Dutton travels the Heartland regularly. She’s partial to BPTs and Bell's.

Zubair Mohajir was born in Chennai, raised in Doha, and has spent the last few years in Chicago, turning the memories of his travels into restaurants.

His newest is Muhājir, a 44-seat Lincoln Park restaurant opens today, and it’s built around migration, spice routes, and live-fire cooking. The name translates roughly to “immigrant,” which gives the restaurant a direct assignment: Mohajir is tracing how food changes as people move, carrying spices, techniques, stories, and occasionally a stubborn refusal to cook inside the borders somebody else drew.

Mohajir

That idea has been showing up in his work for years. At Lilac Tiger, Coach House, and Mirra, Mohajir has built menus that pull from India, the Middle East, Mexico, and the American city around him. Mirra, the Bucktown restaurant he opened with Rishi Kumar, earned the pair a 2026 James Beard Award semifinalist nod for Best Chef: Great Lakes. Muhājir is one of the city’s most anticipated openings of the year, which in Chicago is a useful way of saying: people are seriously paying attention.

At Muhājir, Mohajir is working with chef de cuisine Jacob Dela Cruz. The menu follows the old routes between India, the Middle East, North Africa, Sicily, Andalusia, and Portugal, with shared plates, wood-fired seafood, and ingredients sourced through Chicago’s ethnic markets. David Mor and Richard Beltzer are handling the drinks, and Dela Cruz will get his own turn soon with Bobo, a Filipino cocktail lounge connected to the restaurant.

Muhājir Restaurant Chicago Chef Zubair Mohajir roast

That makes Muhājir more than the next restaurant from a busy chef. It’s the clearest version yet of what Mohajir has been cooking toward: food shaped by migration, served in a city that has always understood the subject.