In the Where to Eat: 25 Best series, we’re highlighting our favorite restaurants in cities across the United States. These lists will be updated as restaurants close and open, and as we find new gems to recommend. As always, we pay for all of our meals and don’t accept free items.

Logan Square
Ramen

Akahoshi Ramen might be the country’s highest-profile restaurant whose chef earned his bona fides on Reddit. The chef and owner, Mike Satinover, was studying in Japan when a bowl of miso ramen in Hokkaido drove him down a path of obsession. For the next decade, Mr. Satinover fastidiously published his ramen research and recipes on the internet forum Reddit, attracting a legion of fans, including established ramen chefs. He brought that viral momentum into this brick-and-mortar restaurant, where reservations are snapped up within minutes of release. Only four ramens are on the menu (the Sapporo-style miso and soupless tantanmen are superb), and Mr. Satinover’s craftsmanship is present in every bowl: Noodles, tare, broth and toppings are all meticulously prepared from scratch.

2340 North California Avenue, Chicago; [akahoshiramen.com](http://akahoshiramen.com)

Walking into the sprawling Al Bawadi Grill transports you to a sumptuous Bedouin tent — ceilings draped with colorful fabric, the waft of grilled meats ever-present. Applying fire to meat has long been a crowd-pleasing tradition, and here, generous portions of kefta and shish kebabs, chicken, lamb and seafood are cooked over glowing mesquite hardwood. Even hunks of chicken breast stay remarkably juicy, the product of a grillmaster with keen eyes and gut feel. These meats (sure, there are plenty of non-animal options) arrive at the table on banquet-size platters, with enough hummus, rice and grilled vegetables to make leftovers the next day, and possibly the day after.

7216 West 87th Street, Bridgeview; 708-599-1999

8501 West Dempster Street, Niles; 847-957-1999; [albawadigrill.com](http://albawadigrill.com)

River North
Basque

Order steak at this Basque chophouse, and instead of choosing rib-eye or filet mignon, you pick which cow you’d like. Maybe it’s Holstein, dry-aged for 18 days and tasting of buttered popcorn. Or Galiciana, a breed raised for more than five years (unlike the 18 months for supermarket steaks), with ruby-red meat and a fat cap so nutty in flavor you’d swear it was Ibérico ham. Whichever of the rotating cattle on the menu you choose, the steaks grilled by Asador Bastian taste like no other beef in town. And they’re not even the best thing on the menu: Seafood dishes, like the creamy paella-esque arroz cremoso, whisk you from this stately townhouse restaurant in the Gallery district to the Bay of Biscay.

214 West Erie Street, Chicago; 312-800-8935; [asadorbastian.com](http://asadorbastian.com)

West Loop and River North
Mediterranean

When Avec opened in 2003 among the meatpacking houses of the West Loop, it won a reputation for breaking restaurant conventions. The dining space and kitchen were one narrow room, like a shipping container, necessitating communal bench seating with strangers. The food came on shareable small plates bearing ingredients from the Mediterranean, like harissa and labneh. Two decades on (with a larger second location in River North), a night at Avec still feels like attending Chicago’s coolest after-hours dinner party. Bacon-wrapped and chorizo-stuffed medjool dates remain an obligatory starter, as is the melty, luscious potato and salted cod brandade with garlic crostini. It’d be hard, though, to top the focaccia baked with ricotta, taleggio and truffle oil, a dish so luxurious it feels like a quesadilla for owners of superyachts.

615 West Randolph Street, Chicago; 312-377-2002

141 West Erie Street, Chicago; 312-736-1778; [avecrestaurant.com](http://avecrestaurant.com)

There’s an inherently magical quality to Lee Wolen’s cooking at Boka: the way he transforms beets into something resembling smoked beef tartare, or the exquisite stuffed chicken with impossibly perfect striations of skin, sausage and breast meat. And yet, Boka has always been the kind of refined, modern restaurant that you never feel you need an anniversary or birthday to visit — call it unfussy, relaxed or jeans-casual. Mr. Wolen’s dishes are almost too impressive for a neighborhood spot like Boka, which recently turned 20 years old. His honey-glazed roasted duck — yielding the most lacquered, gossamer-crisp, perfect bite of duck skin in Chicago — is pure culinary prestidigitation.

1729 North Halsted Street, Chicago; 312-337-6070; [bokachicago.com](http://bokachicago.com)

River North
French

In the 1980s, many critics considered Le Francais — 30 miles north of Chicago in Wheeling, Ill. — the finest restaurant in the country. This was a time when high gastronomy in America was almost always associated with classical French cuisine, involving foie gras and pressed ducks served on bone china. Nowadays in Chicago, upscale non-bistro French cooking is rarely seen; Brindille is an exception. The cousins Carrie and Michael Nahabedian (she’s the chef, he’s the wine director) still believe in the power of a beluga caviar course with mother-of-pearl spoons, and that the potato reaches its ideal when puréed as Joël Robuchon would. Lemon madeleines are still baked to order here, and for $30, a waiter will rain down shavings of Périgord truffles on any course you desire.

534 North Clark Street, Chicago; 312-595-1616; [brindille-chicago.com](http://brindille-chicago.com)

West Loop
Tasting Menu

After closing their three-Michelin-starred Grace in 2017, the chef Curtis Duffy and his partner, Michael Muser, nearly immediately set about expanding upon that restaurant’s vision. Now nearly four years old, Ever is a highly refined but gracious experience. The tables are spaced such that you dine on a private island, only vaguely aware of your neighbors and occasionally visited by installments from Mr. Duffy’s menu. His cooking — he was the chef de cuisine under Grant Achatz at [Alinea](https://www.alinearestaurant.com/) — is meticulous and often surprising. A compressed carrot terrine shares a plate with flavors of black olive and pistachio. Hamachi is frozen with liquid nitrogen and then shaved into curls that thaw to a pleasing texture and are discreetly accented with a piquant sauce of finger limes. Even the butter service — presented in a stacked ribbon reminiscent of a Frank Gehry building — puts on a show.

1340 West Fulton Avenue, Chicago; [ever-restaurant.com](https://www.ever-restaurant.com/)

Andersonville
Belgian Beer Bar

No bar in Chicago treats beer with the intense reverence Hopleaf does. For the 125 bottled Belgian beers offered (and another 62 beers on tap), the bar stocks 87 glasses of varying sizes and shapes that best express how each beer should be served. A tall fluted glass, for example, shows off the colors of a fruit lambic. That level of devotion has made Hopleaf, 32 years in Andersonville, a national monument for beer geeks. Even those who can’t tell a dubbel from a saison have a reason to come. The Belgian-inspired food menu features the hearty likes of sausage plates, rabbit confit and steak frites. Naturally, you have a choice of which beer the mussels are cooked in: witbier or lambic.

5148 North Clark Street, Chicago; 773-334-9851; [hopleafbar.com](http://hopleafbar.com)

Elmwood Park
Italian Beef

[Italian beef](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/27/dining/italian-beef-sandwich-chicago.html) is a Chicago sandwich born of poverty. A century ago, Neapolitan immigrants looking to feed a crowd roasted a flavorless hunk of meat (often bottom round) with heavy seasoning, shaved it thin and piled it sopping-wet into a roll. The sandwich is topped with a spicy bricolage of pickled vegetables called giardiniera. It wasn’t well known outside the city like deep-dish pizza or Chicago hot dogs, but that changed when the FX show “The Bear” romanticized the Italian beef into a culinary objet d’art. For Chicagoans, it remains an Everyman sandwich, a beautiful mess of bread and garlicked beef that resists highfalutin treatments. Johnnie’s Beef has operated in Elmwood Park since 1961; standing in line here, ordering a “beef-hot-dipped,” and eating over the hood of your car remains an indelible Chicago experience.

7500 West North Avenue, Elmwood Park; 708-452-6000; [facebook.com/people/Johnnies-Beef](https://www.facebook.com/people/Johnnies-Beef/100064877400220/)

To eat at Kasama is to experience the seamless