Doc B's Restaurant (Gold Coast)

Here's a place that gets the math right: a tavern in a 1907 building that doubles as a three-room inn, so you can drink, eat a serious burger, and stagger upstairs to a king-sized bed without ever calling a car.

What Mehmet Duzgun is doing at Avaspi in Lakeview is genuinely specific in a way that Mediterranean restaurants in this city rarely are.

Himalayan Sherpa Kitchen on West Lawrence Avenue in Lincoln Square is the kind of restaurant born from a specific and personal ambition: to cook the food of Nepal and Tibet on its own terms, not as a supporting act to Indian cuisine.

Ila's Chicago, tucked into River North at 15 W Hubbard, operates on a premise that most restaurants only gesture toward: the idea that a room should feel like it belongs to someone specific.

Sushi-san is Lettuce Entertain You's case that a high-energy, hip-hop-soundtracked sushi room and serious fish-forward cooking are not mutually exclusive — and by most accounts, it makes the argument persuasively.