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It’s time to announce the winners of the 2019 Eater Awards for Chicago. This is the tenth time Eater is celebrating the top talent from 24 cities around the country (and globe). This year, the local editorial staff chose finalists and ultimately a winner in each of three categories, taking into account reader-submitted nominations over a monthlong period. Restaurants had to have opened since the last few months of 2018 to be eligible.
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These chefs and restaurants are the cream of the crop, the ones that best represent the unique culinary and dining culture of Chicago in 2019. Thank you to everyone who submitted nominees. Find out more about the winners below, which are all receiving the iconic Eater tomato can.
Restaurant of the Year
Virtue
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Chicago is home to many Southern restaurants, but rarely do they include the level of execution, pedigree, hospitality, and impact that Virtue has. Former MK chef Erick Williams’s ambitious eatery combines fine-dining technique with American Southern soul to give Hyde Park the high level of restaurant the studious South Side neighborhood deserves.
Dishes such as cashew dukkah-spiced cauliflower, an eye-catching blackened catfish, and a butcher’s board with ham, head cheese, turkey rillette, pepper jelly, and pickles push diners’s tastebuds while remaining familiar. Atmosphere and service win over a broad clientele as soul music legends waft from speakers and are honored on bathroom walls. It all combines to be one of Eater National’s Best New Restaurants in America — and now Eater Chicago’s Restaurant of the Year.
Chef of the Year
Dave Park, Jeong
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Dave Park put his creative Korean cooking on Chicago’s culinary map while running Hanbun, a stall in a nondescript food court in suburban Westmont, in 2016 and 2017. So when he and partner Jennifer Tran announced the stall’s closure and then that they planned to open a full restaurant in the city in West Town, diners’s expectations were sky high. Jeong then amazingly surpassed those expectations, mainly because of Park’s cooking.
The ingenuity, sophistication, and downright deliciousness of Park’s food has fully blossomed at Jeong, where the full kitchen and city clientele allow the chef to expand what he started at Hanbun. While Park also masterminds cocktails and desserts at the West Town gem, his savory dishes are the stars — from tteokbokki (spicy rice cakes) with schmaltz, pickled mustard, and a quail egg on the a la carte menu; to a choose-your-own-assembly course of yulmoo rice with corn tea- and soy-glazed duck on the tasting menu; the food at Park’s first city restaurant has wowed eaters since it opened on March 1.
Design of the Year
Tzuco
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After earning Michelin stars at his first Chicago restaurant, Carlos Gaytán opened a triple threat in downtown Chicago this year where the chef-owner turns more space and financial backing into a love letter to his Mexican hometown that feels almost like a museum. Designer Ignacio Cadena and team filled the space with an eye-catching array of imported — or items reminiscent of — cooking utensils, plant life, and other trinkets, and placed them in glass cases throughout.
Some of the most intriguing pieces are a comal (circular griddle) that Gaytán used to make his first tortillas, and the same types of vines that grow in his hometown of Huitzuco. The bathrooms are even attention-grabbing, with an imported communal sink as the highlight. While diners are flocking to Tzuco for the chef’s food, the design makes them not want to leave.