The Best Places in Highland Park

1. Eater Best Bakeries
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3. Eater The Best Restaurants in Highland Park

Sweet smoke from the grill drifts across a Highland Park parking lot, and the line at this taqueria doesn't move an inch. The queso taco, built on a blue corn masa tortilla and finished with a melted skirt of Monterey Jack, is the reason most people are here. The homemade salsas run from bright to ferociously spicy. A few picnic tables outside, a Bib Gourmand on the record, and tacos that arrive colorful and structurally ambitious.

1. Michelin Guide Bib Gourmand
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3. Eater The Best Restaurants in Highland Park

The building was once a post office, and the beamed ceilings still carry that civic grandeur, now filled with the noise of a Cal-Ital neighborhood restaurant doing brisk, happy business. The open kitchen anchors a room that works equally well for a date or a loud group. Focaccia arrives complimentary and is the kind you actually remember. Freshly made pasta leads into mains grilled over almond wood, the whole menu moving at an easy, convivial pace.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

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2. Eater The Best Restaurants in Highland Park

This is a relaxed all-day restaurant on North Figueroa where the patio is the main event and the interior is more of a comfortable waiting room for it. The outdoor bar pours frozen daiquiris on weekends, which tells you how the afternoon will go. The dinner menu leans Midwest comfort, with chicken parm and steak au poivre, so nobody has to commit to a theme. Eater has it on its Highland Park list.

1. Eater The Best Restaurants in Highland Park

A sandwich counter tucked inside a Highland Park liquor store, run by a guy who left television writing and producing to make Reubens, which sounds like a premise for a sitcom he'd have rejected. The pastrami comes piled under melted Comte, sauerkraut, and house Russian on griddled seeded rye, with a Gruyere crisp. You order at the register, then claim one of the yellow tables on the sidewalk, ideally while the weather behaves.

1. Eater The Best Restaurants in Highland Park

Las Cazuelas is a family-run Salvadoran restaurant on Figueroa where the recipes come down through the owner's mother, and nobody seems inclined to edit them. Pupusas are the draw, the revuelta with crisped chicharron and a three-cheese stretch in particular. The leather booths are roomy, the prices are easy, and the back lot has parking, a rarity in Highland Park that feels almost like a dare.

1. Eater The Best Restaurants in Highland Park

A build-your-own instant ramen bar does a lot of the talking at this Korean cafe and market tucked behind a Highland Park pocha. The team behind Be Bright Coffee runs the drinks side, with the 2024 U.S. Barista Champion pulling banana matcha lattes alongside grab-and-go banchan, Spam musubi, and a braised oxtail hand pie. It's the kind of neighborhood spot that makes a convincing case for ramen at any hour.

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Sam's Place is a wine bar in a Highland Park bungalow with no website, no social media, and apparently no interest in either. Locals arrive with their dogs and split a platter of sausage, crusty bread, and cornichon butter alongside natural or Old World pours. Wood paneling keeps things cozy, weekends fill up without turning rowdy, and the bar steak is there if a snack plate doesn't count as dinner.

1. Eater The Best Restaurants in Highland Park

Yi Cha means "second round" in Korean, which tells you the plan: show up already fed and keep going. It's a Korean gastropub on North Figueroa, doing pub food with a Korean American accent, like nachos piled with ginger-braised pork and chicken wings in gochujang Buffalo sauce. The cocktails run toward lychee and soju, and the bubbling gamjatang is a fine reason to ignore your original dinner plans.

1. Eater The Best Restaurants in Highland Park

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