Best Restaurants in Chicago 2026
Ten Chicago restaurants that carry the city's deep hospitality tradition and still manage to feel essential — from a Ukrainian Village Filipino breakfast counter to a West Loop Italian room, a Logan Square tasting menu, and the greatest bar burger in the Midwest.
The best restaurants in Chicago are Kasama, Girl & The Goat, Smyth, and more. Start with Kasama if you want the strongest overall first pick.
Top picks at a glance
Who this guide is for
Chicago's dining identity in 2026 is built on a paradox: it is one of the most technically serious food cities in America, and also one of the most genuinely welcoming. The restaurants that define it here refuse to choose between those things. They are precise and warm, ambitious and unpretentious — often in the same room.
Quick picks
On this page
How the restaurants compare
How we chose
We looked for restaurants that feel like a strong fit for the guide topic, not just the most obvious names in the city. The shortlist favors rooms with clear mood, dependable pacing, and enough distinction to help someone decide faster. Read our full methodology →
Lighting, pace, and general energy all need to support the reason someone clicked this guide.
We favored restaurants that feel best suited for the moment, not just restaurants with broad reputation.
The final list tries to give readers enough variation in neighborhood, price, and style to compare real options.
10 ranked picks
Chefs Tim Flores and Genie Kwon's Ukrainian Village restaurant is two different things depending on when you visit — and both versions are essential. During the day, the bakery and breakfast counter serves pandesal and pan de coco that have made it one of the most beloved Filipino bakeries in the country. At dinner, the tasting menu pivots to a more formal expression of Filipino cuisine, refined through the lens of two chefs who trained at some of the best kitchens in America.
The ube croissant alone has inspired pilgrimages from across the country. But the tasting menu — with its slow-braised pork adobo, calamansi-cured fish, and sinuglaw that somehow feels simultaneously ancient and utterly contemporary — is the reason Kasama earned its Michelin star. One of the most exciting restaurants in the country.
Stephanie Izard's West Loop restaurant is the cheerful, generous, deeply flavourful anchor of Chicago's most celebrated restaurant district. Izard — the first woman to win Top Chef — has built a menu around her obsession with goat and other proteins that most American menus ignore: pork face, beef tongue, lamb loin. The dishes are bold without being aggressive, and the room carries a warmth that makes the entire table feel immediately at ease.
The braised goat liver toast is the dish that defines the kitchen's philosophy: an ingredient most restaurants would never touch, treated with enough respect and imagination to make it a bestseller. The wood-fired cauliflower, the whipped feta, the goat empanadas: Girl & the Goat is a restaurant that makes generosity feel like a culinary statement.
Chef John Shields and Karen Urie Shields run one of the most thoughtful tasting menu restaurants in the country from their Logan Square townhouse. The cooking draws on foraging, fermentation, and an obsessive relationship with the Midwest's seasonal pantry — ramps, morels, pawpaws, and black walnuts find their way into courses that feel rooted in place without ever feeling provincial.
The wine list is quietly exceptional, leaning toward natural producers in Burgundy and the Jura. Downstairs, the Loyalist (their companion bar) serves what many consider the best burger in the United States. Smyth is the restaurant that proves Chicago's tasting menu scene belongs in the same conversation as any city in the world.
Paul Kahan's West Loop wine bar and small plates restaurant opened in 2003 and has not stopped being essential since. The chorizo-stuffed medjool dates wrapped in bacon have been on the menu since opening night and remain one of the most addictive dishes in the city — the combination of sweet, smoky, fatty, and spiced is almost impossible to stop eating.
The communal tables, the warm wood-plank walls, the rotating selection of Mediterranean small plates: Avec is the restaurant that defined a genre for Chicago and still executes it better than anyone who followed. Come prepared to share, come prepared to drink interesting wine, and come prepared to stay much longer than you planned.
Sarah Grueneberg's West Loop Italian restaurant is a masterclass in pasta as a serious culinary art form. The chef — a Top Chef finalist who trained in Italy — makes everything by hand: strozzapreti, gnocchetti, maltagliati, and shapes that change with the season and her mood. The carbonara has the kind of glossy, egg-rich sauce that makes you understand why this dish became a classic in the first place.
The room is warm and buzzy, the amaro program is one of the best in the city, and the cheese cart that arrives at the end of dinner is worth ordering before the main courses. Monteverde is the restaurant that convinced a generation of Chicago diners to care about pasta with the same intensity they'd previously reserved for steakhouses.
Giuseppe Tentori's Lincoln Park tasting menu restaurant is the kind of room that makes a special occasion feel genuinely special rather than merely expensive. The chef's Italian heritage informs the cooking without constraining it — a seared scallop arrives with a 'nduja emulsion and smoked caviar, a duck breast gets paired with fermented black garlic and aged balsamic that has been on the property for fifteen years.
The wine program, developed over decades, runs deep into Italian and French producers that most Chicago restaurants don't bother to seek. The front-of-house team, led by sommelier Erin Donahue, treats every table with a warmth that makes a $200 dinner feel like the easiest decision of your year.
David and Anna Poole's Logan Square restaurant is one of the most quietly beautiful rooms in Chicago — intimate, Scandinavian-inflected, lit by candles, and entirely focused on the task of serving an exceptional meal. The tasting menu draws on Nordic technique and Midwestern ingredients: fermented vegetables, cured fish, game birds from Wisconsin farms, and a bread program that Anna Poole has made as serious as any course.
The wine list is thoughtfully natural, the service is genuinely warm without being intrusive, and the whole experience carries the feeling of being cooked for by people who find genuine joy in the work. Elske is the restaurant you recommend to people who want to understand what Chicago's fine dining scene can feel like at its most human.
Noah Sandoval's two-Michelin-star tasting menu restaurant in the West Loop is Chicago's most technically accomplished dining room — a 28-course omakase that moves through Japanese, French, and American traditions with a precision that is genuinely staggering. The approach is collaborative: Sandoval works through what is available, what is at peak quality, and what will surprise without alienating.
The Wagyu with aged soy and black garlic. The caviar with potato foam and chive. The Ibérico pork with sherry vinegar and Marcona almonds: each course feels like a small thesis on what it means to take an ingredient seriously. Oriole is not for every night. It is for the nights when you want cooking to be everything.
Downstairs from Smyth, John Shields and Karen Urie Shields run the Loyalist — a bar and burger counter that happens to serve what many serious eaters consider the greatest burger in the United States. The smash patty, on a custom potato bun, with American cheese, shredded lettuce, and a sauce that exists entirely in its own category: it is the kind of burger that makes you rethink every other burger you've ever eaten.
The bar program is equally considered — cocktails that feel creative without being exhausting, a draft list with genuine thought behind it, a vibe that is relaxed and completely unpretentious for a room attached to a two-Michelin-star tasting menu. The Loyalist proves that the same culinary intelligence can produce extraordinary results at any price point.
Paul Kahan's West Loop tribute to beer, pork, and oysters is a room that makes the simple life seem deeply attractive. The oyster program is one of the most consistent in the city. The pork rinds arrive with a fermented hot sauce that makes every other pork rind you've eaten feel inadequate. The half-chicken, roasted over the wood fire, finishes with skin so crisp it shatters at the touch.
The beer list is enormous and genuinely curated — not just large, but thoughtful, organized by style and country with staff who actually want to talk you through it. The Publican is a reminder that a restaurant built around a single clear obsession — in this case, the perfect afternoon meal of pork and beer — can become one of the essential rooms in a city.
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