The Best French Food in Chicago

You arrive through a converted freight elevator in what used to be a warehouse, which sets the tone before you've touched a menu. Oriole is a tasting-menu restaurant where the chef blends French and Japanese ideas into something that reads as neither, with polished service that somehow avoids feeling stiff. It holds two Michelin stars and a James Beard Award, and the room earns both the ceiling collage and the hushed reverence of everyone in it.

1. AAA Five Diamonds
2. Michelin Guide 2 Stars
3. James Beard Awards 2025 · Winner · Best Chef: Great Lakes · Noah Sandoval

Verzênay is a Lincoln Park patisserie where the French classics arrive in textbook form: chocolate eclairs, crackly kouign-amann, a sourdough baguette that's often still warm. It also keeps an apple pie and a mango passionfruit cheesecake in the case, which the French would presumably allow. The Chicago macaron, filled with caramel, popcorn, and cheddar, is a Garrett Popcorn tribute in cookie form. Saturday mornings call for an early alarm.

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Caviar arrives on mother-of-pearl spoons, and the potato gets the Robuchon purée treatment, which tells you exactly where you are: a polished French restaurant in an era when that's a rarer breed than it once was. The kitchen still bakes madeleines to order, and for a modest surcharge a waiter will shower Périgord truffles on whatever you're eating. The New York Times named it among Chicago's 25 best restaurants. Dress accordingly.

1. AAA Four Diamonds
2. The Banchets Nominee · Best Hospitality
3. The New York Times The 25 Best Restaurants in Chicago Right Now

The foie gras Monte Cristo at brunch should tell you where this is headed. Obélix is a white-tablecloth French bistro in River North where duck, foie gras, and pâté en croûte run through a menu of hearty classics, all made in-house. The sun-drenched dining room fills with seafood platters and bottles of wine at a pace that suggests nobody here came to be sensible. Save room: the pastries alone make a case for staying through dessert.

1. James Beard Awards 2023 · Nominee · Best New Restaurant
2. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant
3. The Infatuation #12 · The 25 Best Restaurants In Chicago

The checkered tile floors and art-lined stone walls make it look like a Parisian bistro that wandered into the West Loop and decided to stay. Creepies is a neighborhood French restaurant from the team behind Elske next door, with a concise menu that leans classic and slides Midwestern where it can. The vesper martini landed on Esquire's list of the best in the country, which is not nothing for a place called Creepies.

1. Esquire Vesper · The Best Martinis in America
2. The New York Times 2026 · The Restaurant List
3. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. The Banchets Winner · Best Neighborhood Restaurant
2. James Beard Awards 2024 · Semifinalist · Outstanding Restaurateur · Nicolas Poilevey and Oliver Poilevey
3. Eater Chicago’s Best Lunch Options

The cheeseburger, griddled and stacked with onion aioli and double cheese on a toasted sesame bun, has its own reputation to manage. But The Loyalist is a proper basement brasserie doing quiche Lorraine, anchovy toasts, and trout grenobloise with a polish that quietly nods to the tasting-menu restaurant upstairs. It sits below Smyth, which holds three Michelin stars, and the kitchen shares the same sensibility at a fraction of the formality.

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2. Time Out #18 · The 25 best restaurants in Chicago
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A French-ish bakery in West Town where the bakers trained in patisserie but treat tradition as a suggestion. Expect baguettes, Brie sandwiches, and sugar-crusted kouign amann, plus a line out the door. Inside, there's room for booths facing the glass-walled baking room, which is a nice way to watch the people who make your four-pastry limit. Eater counted it among Chicago's best new restaurants, and the sandwiches and bread come with no cap.

1. Eater The Best New Restaurants in Chicago
2. The Infatuation The 29 Best Bakeries In Chicago

Gavroche is a modern French restaurant in Old Town, and the burger gets most of the attention. It's a brisket and short rib patty dressed in seared foie gras, caviar, and black truffle, with beef-fat fries, for $55. That tells you the rest of the menu isn't playing it cool either. Expect a date-night room where people dress up a little, then order a hamburger like it's perfectly normal.

1. Time Out #21 · The 25 best restaurants in Chicago
2. Eater Chicago’s Best Burgers

1. AAA Three Diamonds
2. Eater The Best Places to Eat in Suburban Chicago

1. The Banchets Culinary Excellence of the Year · Roland Licioni

1. Forbes Travel Guide Forbes Recommended

The velvet-curtained windows and chandelier glow of this French bistro on Taylor Street have been drawing nostalgic expats and neighborhood regulars for what feels like forever. A cozy back bar invites lingering, but the real draw is the dining room, where frogs' legs Provençale and a properly Gruyère-blanketed French onion soup anchor a menu of classic French cooking with the odd global detour. The courtyard opens when Chicago allows it.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

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Pierrot Gourmet is a French bakery-cafe attached to the Peninsula Hotel, which means it's the one place in that building where nobody asks you to dress up. Grab a seat among the brunching tourists if you like, but the to-go line is where the flaky chocolate croissants, hefty cinnamon rolls, and tarts shaped like chrysanthemums are moving. The Infatuation includes it on its Chicago bakeries list.

1. The Infatuation The 29 Best Bakeries In Chicago

1. Eater Chicago’s Best Burgers
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The Alston is a French-leaning steakhouse on the third floor in River North, where the bread gets sliced at your table and you pick your own candle holder, which is the kind of decision-making that makes a steakhouse feel like a party. Steaks are wood grilled with French sauces on the side, but the duck gets pressed tableside, with a metal contraption wringing out the jus. Eater lists it among Chicago's best steakhouses and River North's best restaurants.

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Petite Edith is a French bistro on the ground floor of a luxury apartment building, which means the neighbors can claim it without ever putting on a coat. The big U-shaped bar seats solo diners comfortably, and the banquettes in back suit a quiet dinner for two. The kitchen takes French classics through a Midwestern filter, so you get two kinds of bread, and brunch brings duck fat hash browns.

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