The 15 Best Chicago Restaurants for Brunch and Breakfast

Jam has a modern-meets-classic interior, blending playful, colorful details with minimalist geometric repetition. Here in Logan Square, diners cozy up in the warm space in the winter, and in the warmer months spill out onto the sidewalk café in front. Specialties include the smoked salmon benedict, propped up on potato-leek cakes and doused in golden bearnaise, but there are a handful of other favorites too – like thick slabs of malted custard French toast, seasonal quiche, and stone-ground oatmeal made with chocolate milk stout.

The food at Proxi is inspired by the street food in Asia, India and Mexico. For brunch, slice into tempura elotes – deep-fried corn kernels bound by panko and cheese – and scoop up piles of kimchi fried rice. Spoon poached eggs bobbing in chickpea curry and chip away at coconut and pandan leaf French toast drizzled with dulce de leche – all without leaving your seat. But the meal is hardly complete until you’ve nursed a glass of the Proxi Michelada: sotol and negra modelo are mixed with clamato, gochujang, worcestershire and lime for a sweet and spicy concoction.

This all-day café highlights a bit of Midwestern pleasure. Heavy, diner-style plates come loaded with the likes of creamed eggs over toast flush with pork fat collards, roast beef sandwiches swiped with spring onion cream cheese, and build-your-own meat and cheese boards. Most of the ingredients arrive from a handful of Upper Midwest farms, and the smoked and cured meats are shipped in from Underground Meats, a Wisconsin-based provider.

It’s all about southern comfort food at this Hyde Park establishment, thanks to southern-born chef Erick Williams. Here, diners often start with an order of coffee cake, billowing with brown sugar streusel, before moving onto savory fare: chicken and waffles, fried green tomatoes and shrimp, and biscuits and smoked salmon. Cocktails are your run-of-the-mill sippers, but the alcohol-free drinks prove far more interesting; the Duke of Earl, for instance, is a base of Earl Gray tea stirred with nutmeg, lemon and egg white.

The unsung heroes at Pacific Standard Time are the kitchen’s wood-burning hearths. Soft, pull-apart milk rolls peppered with every bagel spice are yanked out of the fire, golden brown and prepped to be slathered with whipped cream cheese. The breakfast pizza and wood-fired pita, too, are blistered and charred in the oven, delicately crispy and hot. The rest of the menu leans into west coast cooking: bright, citrus salad, okonomiyaki (a Japanese pancake) with kimchi and scallions, and dreamy seven-spice beer bacon.

Breakfast is served all day, every day at this West Loop favorite. Snag a seat at one of the linoleum stools or padded booths, and let your over-the-top diner dreams come true. Slice into fat Elvis waffles, jammed with bananas and peanut butter-infused butter or the best-selling gooey cinnamon buns, which often run out by afternoon. The rest of the large menu features a host of sandwiches, salads, burgers, shareable snacks, milkshakes and sundaes.

It should come as no surprise that Lula Cafe has remained one of Chicago’s lasting brunch favorites. Helmed by a tribe of self-taught chefs, the cozy café takes seasonal, local produce and transforms it into dishes that rotate with the seasons. There may be a buckwheat crepe folded with duck confit, turnips, burrata and sunny eggs, or the ever-rotating Royale (a piece of the breakfast sandwich series), which recently came jammed with mortadella, provolone, giardiniera, caper aioli and a fried egg. Even with the seasonal changes, there are always a handful of house-made pastries: think blueberry buckwheat miso muffins, sweet corn brioche and pear and gruyere turnovers.

At Nana, Mexican, Latin and Spanish cuisine collide to create an extensive brunch menu. Try the Nanadict, a riff on eggs benedict; English muffins are swapped for house-made sopes, crowned with poached eggs, chorizo and poblano cream. All of the breakfast meats are made in-house, like chicken sausage and house-smoked bacon, which can be found in the breakfast sandwich and accompanying eggs. Most of the menu leans on the savory side, but for those who need a kick of something sweet, the dulce de leche pancakes, finished off with a smattering of caramelized plantains, toasted walnuts and whipped cream, will do the trick.

Perched on the third floor of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Modern Wing, Terzo Piano offers a Sunday-only brunch menu. In the sleek, light-filled space, chef Carolina Diaz works with local and sustainable ingredients, crafting crab fries doused with hollandaise, steak and eggs painted with salsa verde, and a towering black angus double patty burger, piled with a fried egg, avocado, white cheddar, lettuce, tomato and pickles. You’ll want to wash everything down with a cocktail: the citrusy Renzo Piano will do the trick, swirled with basil-infused vodka, Meyer lemon limoncello, lemon-mint syrup and soda.