422 E. 75th | 773-483-3100
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BREAKFAST, LUNCH, DINNER: SUNDAY-MONDAY, WEDNESDAY-SATURDAY | CLOSED TUESDAY
A favorite of Mayor Harold Washington back in the day, Army & Lou’s has been dishing up well-executed southern and soul food for more than 60 years. For starters there’s Louisiana gumbo; in the bread basket are yeasty homemade biscuits, fresh, flaky, and warm. Steak, chicken, and chops come smothered with gravy and served with corn bread: quintessential comfort food. The fried chicken has light, deliciously crispy breading; pieces are so meaty that half a chicken makes a very filling entree. It’s worth ordering a few extra sides, though: greens are tender but not overcooked, sweet potatoes carry a hint of clove, and pickled beets and onions provide a tart contrast. Sweet potato pie and peach cobbler are made, our waitress told us, by a “little old lady from the neighborhood”—which is pretty much how they taste. —David Hammond
5347 N. Clark | 773-275-5725
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LUNCH: MONDAY-FRIDAY; DINNER: SEVEN DAYS | SATURDAY & SUNDAY BRUNCH
Paul Fehribach, former chef at Schubas’ Harmony Grill, has taken the space long home to trapped-in-amber Augie’s diner and turned it into an airy dining room distinguished by floor-to-ceiling windows and wrought-iron chandeliers. Like those chandeliers, the menu gives a little wave to the French Quarter. The cocktail list is full of daiquiris, hurricanes, and nicely balanced Sazeracs—including one with absinthe—and the menu includes crawfish-boudin croquettes and a rich and smoky gumbo with chicken and andouille. I didn’t try the sandwiches but I wish I had: at a neighboring table a sizable Tallgrass beef burger with fontina and aioli was provoking groans of happiness. And the fresh, clean flavors of a simple house salad got my friend to sit up and take notice. All in all Big Jones seems to be striving to fuse the accoutrements of upscale dining with the down-home soul of country cooking. When it works, the results are stellar, both sophisticated and bone-deep satisfying. —Martha Bayne
8734 S. Stony Island | 773-374-4700
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Lunch, Dinner: seven days
BJ’s Market & Bakery, the flagship of John Meyers’s miniempire, lays out honest food at an honest price—no fancy-pants frills, just down-home cooking you order at the counter and bring to your seat. Lightly breaded wings are the only fried chicken on the menu. Instead BJ’s specializes in spice-rubbed smoked rotisserie chicken; moist and flavorful, it’s a real deal. Greens, cooked with smoked turkey leg, have great tooth; black-eyed peas, simple and good, weren’t cooked beyond recognition; even the green beans had subtle seasoning that goosed them up a notch. Sweet potato fries make a good combo with BJ’s signature mustard-fried catfish, and there’s house-made banana pudding and peach cobbler. On Sundays a big crowd rubs shoulders at the long buffet. —David Hammond
Chicago’s Home of Chicken and Waffles
3947 S. King | 773-536-3300
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BREAKFAST, LUNCH, DINNER: SEVEN DAYS | OPEN LATE: FRIDAY & SATURDAY TILL 11 | RESERVATIONS NOT ACCEPTED
Decent enough fried chicken and waffles with syrup couldn’t be simpler, though a myriad of combinations—legs and waffles, thighs and waffles, quarter chicken or half—fill one side of the menu, adding pointless confusion. On the other side there’s a relatively small lineup of typical soul sides—mac ‘n’ cheese was very good, greens were undercooked—and a long list of pretty nonalcoholic concoctions (a “sunset” is lemonade topped with iced tea). —Mike Sula
Chuck’s Southern Comforts Cafe & Voodoo Lounge
6501 W. 79th, Burbank | 708-229-8700
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BREAKFAST, LUNCH, DINNER: SEVEN DAYS | OPEN LATE: every night TILL 2
Chuck Pine spent two and a half years at Topolobampo under the tutelage of Rick Bayless before striking out on his own, opening a small barbecue shack in the meat-and-potatoes parking lot of south-suburban Burbank. Beginning in 1997 with the occasional pot of gumbo, his Mexican and southern specials have eclipsed the barbecue. Pine wants to show his customers the great variety within Mexican and deep south cooking, at prices much lower and in an atmosphere more casual than at other shops around town started by Bayless’s flock. Pine continually travels, studying Cajun, Creole, and Mexican regional cooking styles. Cinco de Mayo and Mardi Gras are the best times to visit, when month-long blowouts warrant daily specials like a trio of homemade chorizos and chiles en nogada—poblanos stuffed with meat and fruit, covered in walnut sauce and grapes. Pine always throws a few curveballs in as well: paella, say, or strawberry salad, or Creole-Italian dishes like lasagna with andouille. Normally when restaurants try to do so many different things they do none of them well, but Pine cooks by his whims consistently well. Now in a new location, he’s offering live music and a bar menu available up to an hour before closing. —Mike Sula
809 E. 63rd | 773-643-6670
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Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner: seven days
Daley’s is one of the oldest existing restaurants in the city, if not the oldest, though ask any waitress exactly how old and you’ll get a different answer every time—usually something like “A long time, baby.” The previous owner, Nick Kyros, says an Irishman opened the place in 1892 and ran it until his father took over in 1918; now he’s turned it over to his son Michael and co-owner Nick Zar. Today the majority of his employees and customers are neighborhood folks who pack in for massive portions of mostly solid, sometimes-from-scratch soul food at practically historical prices. It’s not hard to eat incredibly well, though you have to be selective. The biscuits are light and fluffy, but the mashed potatoes are instant. The chicken gumbo is tangy and thick but mined with canned green beans. One serving of smothered chicken can look like it was fed on steroids while another looks starved. The beefy, cheesy patty melt is a sure thing, as is a side of cabbage with bits of ham, and just about anything can be livened up with the bottle of spicy red pepper vinegar on each table. Nobody stays alive for more than a century without doing something right. —Mike Sula
3175 W. Madison | 773-638-7079
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BREAKFAST, LUNCH, DINNER: SUNDAY, TUESDAY-SATURDAY | CLOSED MONDAY
Fried chicken at Edna’s is cooked to order, juicy, crunchy, salty, and fresh, the kind of bird I dream about. Side dishes are a greatest hits of southern lovin’: fresh-baked short biscuits, pickled beets, mac ‘n’ cheese, collard greens with optional onion and tomato on top. When Edna dropped by my table to say hello, I told her that I’d been here for a 6 AM breakfast with a crowd of white people a few years ago. “I remember you all,” she crowed. “Welcome back!” She vanished into the kitchen, and one by one, unbeckoned, more side dishes came out—we sampled nine out of the ten on the menu that afternoon. A longtime regular looked over as I picked at my sweet potatoes: “You stuffed? Edna, she stuffs you, that’s how she gets you,” she said. “Now you’re hooked, just like me.” —Seth Zurer
2803 W. Chicago | 773-489-4600
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BREAKFAST: MONDAY-FRIDAY; LUNCH, DINNER: SEVEN DAYS | SATURDAY & SUNDAY BRUNCH | BYO | RESERVATIONS NOT ACCEPTED | cash only
Feed is the project of Donna Knezek, one of the original owners of Leo’s Lunchroom and a founder of Bite. It’s a shack with a chalkboard menu that begins 1/4 chicken, 1/2 chicken, whole chicken. Needless to say, get the chicken: salty and succulent, it has the golden crackle of skin that makes rotisserie bird so viscerally satisfying. Knezek has been cooking in Chicago for around two decades, but at Feed she originally pared down her menu to the point of parody: chicken, burger, Caesar salad, a daily special, and a dozen sides. They include fried okra, a homey, comforting corn pudding, and rich and cheesy baked mac ‘n’ cheese. Now she’s relented some, adding a pulled pork and a barbecued chicken sandwich to the offerings; brunch items might include pulled pork hash and green tomato eggs Benedict. For dessert there’s pie and fluffy, creamy banana pudding served in a Styrofoam cup, with Nilla Wafers throughout. —Nicholas Day
1235 W. Randolph | 312-226-8227
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BREAKFAST, LUNCH: SEVEN DAYS
At Ina Pinkney’s cheerful namesake restaurant, brick walls are brightened with salmon trim and aqua wainscoting and tables are topped with white butcher paper and salt-and-pepper shakers from Pinkney’s eclectic collection. The breakfast menu includes four kinds of pancakes, homemade granola with dried cranberries, omelets with potatoes, and vegetable hash, plus southern favorites like chicken and waffles and scrapple with cheddar, black beans, and corn,. The bread comes fresh from Labriola, the coffee from Intelligentsia. Perhaps best of all, the place is a cell-phone-free zone—not even then-governor Rod Blagojevich was allowed to make an exception. The dinner menu will return along with outdoor seating when the weather’s better. —Laura Levy Shatkin
5412 W. Madison | 773-261-2316
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Lunch, Dinner: seven days
Sometimes the line snakes out the door of the always bustling Macarthur’s, a cafeteria with a wide selection of heavy, slow-cooked meats and sides and an assured high turnover on the steam tables. For around seven bucks a hefty portion of meat and two, topped with a corn muffin, is lunch and then some. Ham hocks are tender and not too smoky or salty, with red fall-off-the-hock meat enveloped in a collar of quivering browned fat. Smothered pork chops are richly coated with gravy and onions. And though buffet fried chicken always suffers, here it’s not transgressive—the crust is fairly light and not too greasy. At any given time you’ll encounter other standards and sides: fried catfish, smothered chicken, greens, mac ‘n’ cheese, red beans, mashed potatoes, and desserts like banana pudding or sweet potato pie. On the walls are lots of photos of African-American political players enjoying themselves in the large and comfortable but bland Denny’s-style space, but it’s not surprising most people take out—this kind of food isn’t going to suffer from a car ride. —Mike Sula
Miss Lee’s Good Food
203 E. Garfield | 773-752-5253
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LUNCH, DINNER: SUNDAY, TUESDAY-SATURDAY | CLOSED MONDAY
A 31-year veteran of the late, great Gladys’ Luncheonette, Miss Lee is the Florence Nightingale of home-style granny food without a bit of fanciness or fuss. But if cooking like hers were really that simple, everybody would be doing it. She’s justifiably proud of her desserts: her bread pudding and fruit cobblers are La Brea Tar Pits of sweetness—covered with a delicate layer of sugary, caramelized crust but soft and heavy underneath. She rotates a daily menu of high-density, low-gravity comforters like baked turkey and dressing, stewed chicken and noodles, smothered pork chops, catfish, short ribs, and roast beef and dressing. Each comes packed with a pair of biscuits or corn muffins and two sides (the creamy black-eyed peas and spicy collard greens are capital, and Miss Lee swears by her yellow turnips, i.e., rutabagas). The a la carte options are great too: there’s mac ‘n’ cheese and a spicy rubbed bird of her own invention that she calls “herbal chicken” (add 50 cents for white meat). It’s a good thing food like this travels, because Miss Lee’s is carryout only. All the better—it’s the type of eating that goes down best with a sofa nearby. —Mike Sula
8223 S. Ashland | 773-488-5700
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BREAKFAST, LUNCH, DINNER: SEVEN DAYS | RESERVATIONS NOT ACCEPTED
From the outside, Turner’s doesn’t look much different from the innumerable ramshackle independent fast-food joints and soul kitchens all over the south side. The menu is hand painted next to the door, and the sign above the awning says the place is called Johnson’s. Beyond the stark waiting area it’s a little more cheerful: a sliding-glass door leads to the low-ceilinged, fluorescent-lit dining room with a TV and a video jukebox that plays everything from gospel to Guns n’ Roses. Still, it’s no preparation for the heaping, luxurious plates that appear through a window from the kitchen. The cook, Murilee Johnson, arrives at six every morning and gets to work on about a dozen different daily specials and a vast array of sides, all the heavy hallmarks of the southern/soul-food canon—turkey wings and dressing, salmon croquettes, ham hocks, liver with onions and bacon, five kinds of beans, okra two ways, mac ‘n’ cheese, candied yams, and greens simmered with a choice of turkey or pork. Substantial dishes such as these tend to vary little from one place to the next, but Johnson’s cooking is something special. She says she does it with “love,” and works “by the spirit,” and if you’re not a believer, her chicken and dumplings—soft stewed meat and fat, toothy noodles—will set you straight. Fine-dining chefs everywhere have rediscovered the wonders of beef short ribs, but hers—dinosaur-size and falling off the bone in a simple, spicy gravy—are fundamentally righteous. —Mike Sula
1001 W. Washington | 312-850-2663
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BREAKFAST, LUNCH: MONDAY-FRIDAY; DINNER: TUESDAY-SATURDAY | SATURDAY & sunday brunch
The menu rarely changes, but no one seems to mind—Wishbone’s combination of fast, reliable, moderately creative food, brisk service, full patio, and funky decor doesn’t need much tinkering. Lunch and dinner feature upscale southern comfort food such as blackened catfish, chicken-fried steak, collard greens, and buttery corn bread muffins. Wishbone packs them in for weekend breakfast with platters of reasonably priced omelets, eggs Florentine, crab cakes, and the cheesiest grits in town. —Martha Bayne