Search

Regressing back to childhood is a very good thing when you’re doing it at this lively, lime-green café. Pastry chef Stephanie Samuels makes the kind of desserts you used to find in your lunch box: Ding Dongs, Thin Mints and cream-filled cupcakes…

Don’t take our word for it—any Jew or New Yorker can tell you the best bagel in Chicago is not in Chicago. It’s in Lincolnwood, at a nondescript strip mall just off I-94. This place never closes, doesn’t have tables and until recently, didn’t accept plastic…

This Bridgeview Middle Eastern grocery has a solid meat counter and an impressive assortment of locally baked pitas and other Middle Eastern breads still warm in the package, as well as fresh spices such as za’atar, a zesty mix of sesame seeds and herbs…

Anyone who fears that Ukrainian Village is losing its ethnicity can take solace in this bakery and café. Well-heeled women chat about coffee and cake, and neighborhood elders tuck into particularly good bowls of borscht, all to the tune of Ukrainian chatter…

For nearly two decades this French-leaning café and bakery has been a reliable morning pit stop for students and teachers grabbing croissants on the go, as well as a preferred baker when special occasions call for cake…

The project of sister team Kathryn and Laura Pekarik, Cupcakes for Courage donates a portion of the proceeds from its namesake sweets to cancer research and the Ride Janie Ride Foundation…

Before Lupita Kuri bought this mobile business and had the truck (and all its recipes) shipped to Chicago, Sweet Ride was a phenom in San Francisco. Fearful of cupcake overload, the petite, hot-pink truck offers baseball-sized whoopie pies, puddings and Mexican hot chocolate…

With a name like “flirty,” it’s got to be cute, right? In fact, this truck specializes in cuteness, from the Pepto-pink paint job to crowning cupcakes with names like the McDreamy and Smore Me Over…

The More Mobile The city’s most upscale cupcakery also has the city’s most elegant food truck. It’s more of a van, really, with a display window showing off the sophisticated—and devastingly delicious—cupcakes people track it down for…

Chalk it up to French stubbornness that despite terms prohibiting the sale of individual pastries or a cup of coffee, Vincent Colombet signed a lease on this Logan Square corner for his first retail bakery (he gets around it by selling “wholesale” via punch cards for a dozen of anything)…