The Best Vegetarian-Friendly and Vegan Restaurants in Chicago

Everything from the spicy seitan to the hummus and vegan cheese is made in-house at Kitchen 17. Find the beloved seitan wrapped in fluffy Greek flatbread in the gyro or griddled with cheese and green peppers in the philly cheesesteak. The rest of the menu reads as vegetized versions of your favorite bar food, such as buffalo cauliflower wings, chili cheese fries, veggie burgers drenched in barbecue sauce and personal pan pizzas strewn with crumbles of soy sausage and vegan mozzarella.

The slogan at this diner – “Meat Free Since ’83” – certainly rings true. Everything on the large menu is vegetarian and vegan or can be made vegan. Here, you can sink your teeth into Thai chili wings (seitan “wingz” brushed with chili-lime marinade) and spoon into quinoa chili paired with jalapeño corn fritters. In true diner style, there are milkshakes – just without the milk – blended with peanut butter and cookie dough.

It’s all about vegan Thai food at Urban Vegan. Highlights include steamed curry dumplings, soy chicken satay, and veggie puffs swollen with peas and sweet potatoes. All entrées come with your choice of protein – soy chicken, soy pepper steak, seitan, soy fish, tofu, soy shrimp – and flat and round noodles are stir-fried with bean sprouts, mushrooms and other seasonal vegetables.

This postage-stamp-size café is 100 percent vegan. Using organic products, the kitchen transforms simple ingredients into wheat wraps rolled with sweet potatoes and black beans and summer rolls jammed with ginger pesto, avocado, spinach, seaweed and roasted peanuts. The nachos are a local favorite, studded with bits of vegetables and red pepper hummus, or if you’re thirsty, you can walk away with a smoothie, blended with the likes of almond butter, cinnamon, mango and coconut milk.

Bad Hunter’s cheeky name derives from its vegetable-forward personality, where the kitchen cooks up a host of plant-based dishes, such as seared apples strewn with stracchino cheese, plump butter dumplings filled with squash and candied hazelnuts, and crispy brussels sprouts paired with a cumin lentil puree. Vegetables even make it into the dessert section, where you can expect things like sweet potato and peanut mousse and parsnip cake topped with a poached pear.

Now with three locations, Beatrix continues to serve the Chicago community with vegetable-centric fare. Whether you come for breakfast, brunch, lunch or dinner, there’s always something for non-meat eaters. For brunch, plates of quinoa cakes crowned with poached eggs fly out of the kitchen, and at dinner, you’ll want to snack on soft local burrata prepped with oven-dried tomatoes and a vegan eggplant steak showered with breadcrumbs tinged with garlic. On your way out, stop by the coffee and pastry bar, where you can pick up sweets like honey-butter cinnamon rolls, candied orange scones and butterscotch oatmeal cookies.

Everything is raw at Chicago Raw, so expect a mix of uncooked, plant-based products. The menu is large, divided into many sections: smoothies, elixirs, sandwiches, salads, spreads and dehydrated sweets. Try the fresh spinach lasagna, swiped with cashew cheese, or snag the sunflower seed cheese, ready to be mopped up with onion-flecked flatbread. For Chicago Raw lovers, the café offers a weekly takeaway program – where you can place an order for five breakfast items, one sandwich, four entrées, two salads, one spread, one savory and two desserts – so you’ll have food for the entire week.

At Demera, no one will scold you for eating with your hands. That’s because Ethiopian cuisine is typically eaten by using your hands to scoop up vegetables and lentils with a spongy and porous flatbread called injera. Get a sampling of the bright, colorful dishes, which include split red lentils, slow-cooked collard greens, split yellow peas and sautéed garden beets.

True Food Kitchen caters to a wealth of people, including carnivores, vegetarians and those who are dairy- or gluten-free. The expansive sit-down restaurant serves up elevated café fare such as a cauliflower polenta bowl rife with asparagus and snap peas; an inside-out quinoa burger swiped with hummus and tzatziki; and a spaghetti squash casserole layered with tomatoes, zucchini and mozzarella. Each dish is marked with a ‘v,’ ‘gf,’ or ‘veg,’ so you’ll know exactly what you can order.