The Best New(ish) Chicago Restaurants of 2025
One of the reasons I started The Hunger was so I didn’t have to write another listicle.
Anyone living the freelance life knows what I mean. In order to grab any dollar you can, sometimes about $100, which will likely be paid at best 30 days from submission or maybe never (this happens way more than you think), you will find yourself doing endless revisions and arguing with an editor enforcing “THE VOICE OF THE PUBLICATION” over the best seventeen places to get a fish fry in Hegewisch.
Actually, that’s not true. There’s only a few fish frys in Hegewisch and Club 81 Too is probably the best – although, and maybe this is a piece for Lent next year, there are a lot of church and VFW hall fish frys that should be explored and ranked that I have not stepped foot into (if you’re a writer who just read this and wants this challenge – let’s talk).
Also, most Chicago journalism outlets don’t even know there are neighborhoods beyond Logan Square, The Loop, and Bucktown. If they really want to seem edgy they might mention Avondale.
All the other stuff is true though and so I’ve generally retired from that listicle life. The lists I can’t get away from writing however are the best restaurants of the year and the best things I ate and drank. I think it’s because in the intense scramble to bring you at least one good column a week all year I don’t get a lot of time to reflect on the Chicago scene in a holistic way. And I still kinda want to do that.
And so here we go, I’m writing about the best restaurants of the year like everyone else is.
I’d still like to bring a twist or something different to the game if I can. What is that zag? It’s not very complicated, but I do think it’s a differentiator, mine is a list from a single person who’s actually eaten at every single one of these spots, not crowd-sourced from a handful of writers with different viewpoints.
The other twist: I am not putting anyone on the list because they were on TV, or they seem cool, or my publication has, or wants, a brand deal with the restaurant.
This year I’m also going to challenge myself by ranking each spot in relative order based on my verve for each.
One final thing: most people write these year-end lists with the qualifier of “best new”. Chicago isn’t overrun with new spots like say New York, and so to have any content at all, publications are forced to list pretty much every restaurant of consequence that opened in a given year whether it was good or not.
I’m going to focus on new places, but also I’m gonna throw in a few spots that are newish and a couple that have been around awhile just because I enjoyed my meals there this year so much. One thing applies to all these places: I truly loved every one of these meals no matter in what order they’ve been listed.