CITY GUIDES | CHICAGO
12 Places That Explain Chicago’s Red-Hot Restaurant Scene
The city’s best tables run on tasting menus, Korean BBQ, Cambodian recipes, and Midwestern grit.
By Jamie Dutton
Updated Aug. 26, 2026
Union
AUTHOR BIO: Jamie Dutton's job has her in airports regularly, as does a family spread out across the Midwest. She’s partial to BPTs and Bell’s.
I started my Chicago restaurant list when I spent part of college in the city. It followed me through several Chicago neighborhoods, growing every time I found a place I wanted to return to and, faster still, every time I heard about somewhere new. I live elsewhere now, but work brings me back often enough that the city still feels like home. On a recent trip, I ate through another stretch of the list and revised it once again. Here are the best restaurants in Chicago right now.
Alinea
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Michelin took one of Alinea’s three stars in 2025, ending a run that stretched back to the guide’s first Chicago edition. Grant Achatz has since introduced an entirely new menu, new serviceware, and even more theater in the Gallery and Kitchen Table, informed partly by the restaurant’s 20th-anniversary tour around the world. Dinner still bends the rules: smoke escapes, courses change shape, and dessert may take over the table. Two stars hardly make Alinea an underdog, but the restaurant remains unlike any other in Chicago.
Best for: Dinner as full-scale theater
Asador Bastian
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Doug Psaltis and Hsing Chen treat fire like an ingredient, charring Basque-cut steaks and whole fish over hot coals. The beef may include heavily marbled cuts from Galicia or Japan, served by weight and intended for the table. Bone-marrow mashed potatoes and piquillo peppers handle supporting roles in a River North townhouse where the steaks arrive without the usual steakhouse solemnity.
Best for: Basque steaks cooked over live fire
Cariño
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Cariño earned a Michelin star in 2024, putting Uptown on the map for Latin-American tasting menus. Chef Norman Fenton is behind plates that flip between bold sauces, little tacos, and risotto-like globes nodding to Mexican traditions. It’s playful, colorful, and feels fresh, not felt-it-all-before Michelin formality.
Best for: A Latin American tasting menu with late-night energy
Creepies
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Creepies sounds like somewhere you would avoid after dark. Instead, David and Anna Posey, the couple behind Michelin-starred Elske, have filled this West Loop bistro with checked floors, mismatched chairs, and French cooking loosened up by Midwestern instincts. Chef de cuisine Tayler Ploshehanski turns a croque madame into Parisian gnocchi with ham, Swiss cheese, egg yolk, mustard, and a pastry lid meant to be shattered. Brie-filled gougères and saucisson wrapped in puff pastry keep dinner moving in the same rich direction.
Best for: French bistro cooking without French bistro solemnity
Daisies
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Chef Joe Frillman and pastry wizard Leigh Omilinsky have turned this Logan Square spot into an all-day shrine to Midwestern abundance—house-made pastas, peak-season vegetables, and desserts that make you question every sad cookie you’ve ever had. It’s casual enough for laptops and strollers by day, but come dinnertime, it runs like a restaurant that knows exactly what it’s doing.
Best for: Midwestern pasta followed by exceptional pastry
Kasama
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Kasama operates almost as two restaurants. During the day, lines form for Filipino breakfast plates, savory sandwiches, and Genie Kwon’s pastries. At night, the Ukrainian Village café becomes a reservation-only tasting counter where Kwon and Tim Flores apply fine-dining precision to Filipino flavors. Michelin promoted Kasama to two stars in 2025, another first for the world’s first Michelin-starred Filipino restaurant. Dinner may include mussels and wild mushrooms presented as adobo or mais con yelo remade with sweet corn semifreddo and milk granita.
Best for: Breakfast and/or a $325 tasting menu
Khmai Cambodian Fine Dining
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Cambodian food hasn’t had a stage in Chicago like this before, and now it does—in Rogers Park, no less. Chef Mona Sang serves amok with flaky fish and coconut curry so smooth you’ll take home the leftover sauce even though that’s the only thing left in the bowl. The space is small, family-run, and proof that “fine dining” doesn’t have to mean tuxedoed service or four-digit wine lists.
Best for: Cambodian cooking presented with ceremony
Lao Peng You
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Brothers Daniel and Eric Wat built Lao Peng You around the Chinese dumplings, breads, and noodles they grew up eating. Dumplings filled with pork and dill or mushroom and chive arrive in broth sharpened with chili oil, while wide noodles sink beneath sliced beef shank and leafy greens. The stools are cramped, the prices remain reasonable, and waits form regularly outside. That bowl of broth explains why people stay in line.
Best for: Handmade dumplings and noodles worth waiting for
Maxwells Trading
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An urban farm operates directly above Maxwells Trading, supplying honey and produce to a kitchen run by chef-partner Erling Wu-Bower and executive chef Chris Jung. Their menu trades freely between Asian and American traditions: Japanese eggplant comes with confit tomatoes, soup-dumpling tortellini holds pork shoulder and maitake mushrooms, and half chicken à la brasa arrives with yuca, aji verde, and ginger-scallion salsa. Both chefs were James Beard Award finalists for Best Chef: Great Lakes in 2025.
Best for: Globally influenced cooking with a rooftop garden upstairs
Perilla Steakhouse
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Perilla Korean American Steakhouse gives Chicago’s beef traditions a tabletop grill and plenty of banchan. The menu separates its 60-day dry-aged ribeye from marinated prime short rib, along with American Wagyu hanger and picanha meant to be grilled at the table. Ssam, kimchi, corn cheese, and sweet potatoes with bone-marrow butter crowd the rest of the spread. Inside the L7 Hotel, dinner lands somewhere between Korean barbecue and a downtown steakhouse.
Best for: Korean barbecue dressed for downtown
Smyth
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A farmhouse fantasy hidden behind a West Loop door, Smyth now holds three Michelin stars. John Shields and Karen Urie Shields serve you a series of delicate, mind-bending things, like the milk brioche pictured above topped with barbecued eel and uni sourced from Maine. It’s the rare fine dining place that somehow still feels like someone’s cooking just for you.
Best for: Chicago’s only three-Michelin-star dinner
Union
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Union is a Logan Square tavern with New American cooking, 24 rotating draft lines, and a whiskey list that passes 200 bottles. Fried olives and lamb meatballs lead toward a particularly serious burger, while the taps favor breweries from Chicago and around the Great Lakes. Michelin has awarded Union a Bib Gourmand for three consecutive years, although the bar feels considerably less interested in awards than in what should accompany the next pour.
Best for: A serious burger with a deep whiskey list
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