The Best Mediterranean Food in Chicago

The entire room is wood-plank from floor to ceiling, which either reads as cozy or a fire hazard, depending on your mood. This West Randolph wine restaurant has been packed since forever, with regulars jostling for counter stools and close-set tables to graze through a seasonal Mediterranean menu. The plates are bold, colorful, and generously sized, and the wine list leans into the food rather than upstaging it.

1. Wine Enthusiast Forward 50 Restaurants
2. The Banchets Winner · Restuarant of the Year
3. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A charcoal hearth does most of the heavy lifting at this Adriatic-inspired restaurant in West Fulton Market, turning out lamb and other mains with a smoky authority you can smell from the door. Chef Joe Flamm built the room to feel like a Croatian konoba, all whitewashed walls, rustic clay, and hanging plants, with servers who can actually walk you through the menu. Bright, easy, and louder than a library.

1. The Banchets Nominee · Restuarant of the Year
2. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant
3. Eater The 38 Best Restaurants in Chicago

Apolonia is a hotel restaurant in the South Loop with the calm, spare look of a place that doesn't need to shout, and a Euro-Mediterranean menu with white-tablecloth ambitions. The handmade pastas are the main event, and a truffle puff bread arrives at the table with enough theater to turn heads two booths over. Its sommelier took home a Banchet, so the wine list probably isn't an afterthought. Dress like you've been somewhere.

1. The Banchets Winner · Sommelier of the Year · Jelena Prodan
2. The Banchets Nominee · Chef of the Year · Stephen Gillanders
3. Eater The Best Restaurants in Chicago’s South Loop

The focaccia here arrives stuffed with ricotta, taleggio, and truffle oil, which a Times writer once described as a quesadilla for superyacht owners, and he wasn't wrong. This rustic Mediterranean small-plates restaurant is the larger River North sibling of a West Loop original that made communal bench seating feel like a good idea. Shareable plates, a warm room, and a crowd that lingers long past the last bite.

1. The New York Times The 25 Best Restaurants in Chicago Right Now
2. The 50 The 50 Discovery
3. Eater The Best Restaurants in River North

A sunny corner spot in Logan Square where the kitchen skips the tweezers and the fancy glassware in favor of food that tastes like itself. Cellar Door Provisions is a casual, Mediterranean-leaning restaurant with the kind of unfussy cooking that makes you wonder why anyone bothers with the other kind. The Michelin Guide gave it a Bib Gourmand, which tracks. Counter seats, date nights, and wandering-in-off-the-street all work equally well here.

1. Michelin Guide Bib Gourmand

Seville is a rooftop Mediterranean restaurant on top of a Hilton, which sounds like a warning and mostly isn't. The menu leans on tapas, pasta, fish, and pinsa, all sized for splitting, so it suits coworkers on the company card and out-of-town friends who just got talked into the Skydeck. The big patio gets you the Loop skyline without pressing your face against glass. The Infatuation lists it among the Loop's best.

1. The Infatuation The 14 Best Restaurants In The Loop