Restaurant

Morocco won a group containing the second- and third-place finishers in the last World Cup and then defeated the heavyweight Spain in the first knockout round of the 2022 World Cup. Khalid Kamal, the owner of the Moroccan restaurant Shokran, is rooting from them from afar, along with his family back in Morocco.

Chicago is an outstanding food city—but you don’t have to eat at Michelin-star restaurants to enjoy the exceptional dining culture. The city’s (and suburbs’) diners are where Chicagoans of all types congregate for some quick, hearty food and hot coffee.

Mona Sang opened Khmai Fine Dining, one of two Cambodian restaurants in Chicago, to share the recipes and culture of her mother, who fled the Khmer Rouge genocide and ended up in Chicago, where she supported herself and four children as a caterer. 

We asked our audience to tell us about closed restaurants that they sorely missed, and were delighted by the fond memories people shared of establishments throughout the city and suburbs, in a variety of cuisines. Is your favorite on the list?

What does it take to make a fine dining restaurant run smoothly—especially one like Avondale's Wherewithall, where the menu changes every week? A creative and organized chef de cuisine and multitasking general manager, for one. 

As iconic signs like Dinkel's and Orange Garden's disappear from Chicago, celebrate some of Chicago's most memorable restaurants, past and present, the kind of places where the surroundings are an inextricable part of the experience. 

The list of semifinalists for the James Beard Awards has been released, and fifteen Chicago people and places in the food industry are on it. Meet them here.

Women are drastically under-represented as lead chefs in the restaurant business, but a new nonprofit aims to begin changing that. “I feel like the difficulties and the lack of systemic support for motherhood are a big part of why a lot of women drop out of this industry," says Beverly Kim.

During Women's Restaurant Week, from August 26 through 31, you can support women-owned restaurants during the difficult times of the COVID-19 pandemic as some twenty establishments across Chicagoland offer various specials. 

After remodeling, Lincoln Square's LC Phở n Grill reopened with an expanded menu that features harder-to-find Vietnamese dishes that the husband-and-wife owners workshopped while exploring Vietnamese restaurants in California.

Han Bat serves basically one thing: the milky, restorative Korean soup known as seolleongtang, which takes hours and hours to make. "When [Koreans] come to visit Chicago, they come over here, because... we are the only one who does this kind of food," says the owner.

"I never really loved high school lunches or any of that, anything outside of what my mom prepared in the kitchen," says Ray Espiritu, the owner of Isla Pilipina in Lincoln Square. When he didn't know what to do after graduating, he decided to take over a restaurant.

Himalayan Sherpa Kitchen serves many hard-to-find Nepali specialties, which combine Indian, Tibetan, and Chinese culinary influences, unlike many other Nepali restaurants in Chicago, which offer mostly North Indian dishes.

Andrea Andrade and Jose Navea didn't plan to stay in Chicago when they came to visit. Now they operate their own restaurant serving arepas, a nostalgic staple food of their home country of Venezuela. "You can't say Venezuela and not say arepas," Navea says. 

"For me, sustainability is developing and training the largest sum of African American and brown young men and women that I can possibly find," says chef Erick Williams, who has recently garnered national acclaim for his new Hyde Park restaurant, Virtue.