A Chicago Food Crawl: Your Local Dining Guide

You’re in Chicago for 48 hours, and you’re hungry. What’s the plan? We’ve rounded up the best spots to hit on your first trip to town: the breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and everything-in-between that will give you a definitive sampling of what the city has to offer. Let’s get to it.

The OpenTable team

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Updated March 10, 2019

Parachute

Price: Expensive

Korean

Avondale

4.8

1625 reviews

Parachute is one of Chicago’s most-talked-about restaurants, and it’s not hard to see why. Chefs Beverly Kim and Johnny Clark’s take on Korean-American food is singular and unique, with takes on classic dishes like bibimbap, mandu, and dukbukki that at once thoughtful, exciting, and new.

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Girl & the Goat

Price: Moderate

Contemporary American

West Loop

4.7

13525 reviews

Chef Stephanie Izard isn’t just the first female Top Chef winner—she’s also the lady behind one of Chicago’s most celebrated restaurants. Cuisine-wise, Girl and the Goat is probably best described as “global”—but labels don’t matter here. This is delicious, exciting food, the kind of stuff you’ll be thinking about the rest of the weekend.

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Gibsons Bar & Steakhouse - Chicago

Price: Moderate

Steakhouse

Gold Coast / Streeterville

4.7

7567 reviews

We’re in the Midwest, after all—and if you’re eating steak in this town, you want to be eating it at Gibson’s. They even have a USDA grade named for them: USDA Gibsons Prime Angus. This is a steakhouse in every sense of the word, and it’s glorious.

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