Restaurants in Berwyn

Live music and nightly specials on comfort fare, beer, and cocktails lure spirited crowds into Drum & Monkey, a cozy Irish bar located near the University of Illinois at Chicago campus. The establishment's draft-libation varieties include Smithwick's, Bell's Oberon, and Miller Lite, and a menu loaded with comfort fare acts as a perfect quaffing countermeasure. To create the house specialty, irish nachos, chefs swap out tortilla chips for fried potatoes, and serve them to diners seated at the bar or writing poetry about particle physics at long wooden tables. Drum & Monkey encourages late-night revelry with its 2 a.m. closing time and weekly events, including Tuesday-night karaoke, Thursday College Nights, and live music.

Maddanthony's Bar and Grill sports 2,000 square feet of lounging space with plasma televisions and pool tables. Waiters pile plates with food from sister restaurant LaCoco's Pizza & Pasta next door and pour suds until 4 a.m. Sunday–Friday, 5 a.m. on Saturdays, and forever during a time warp. Darts leagues fling projectiles at targets throughout the fall, and karaoke enthusiasts belt tunes on Tuesday nights. The bar maintains a young, energetic vibe with abundant events and eats, hosting nights centered around UFC matchups, boxing tournaments, and high-octane city-council meetings.

Under the light cast by fringed Middle Eastern lanterns, Kan Zaman's friendly servers guide guests through the authentic Lebanese menu of velvety hummus drizzled with olive oil, beef kebabs served alongside charbroiled vegetables, and smoky baba gannouj. Seated at low booths, diners can recline on colorful pillows in between bites of shawarma and battle over the last triangle of warm pita. Once located in Andersonville, the River North location is BYOB and boasts belly-dancing performances on Friday and Saturday nights.

Working from a menu that blends the diverse cuisines of the Mediterranean coast, Haifa Café's chefs heap plates high with delicacies created from recipes honed over the years by the owner's family and friends. Grilled kebabs of chicken, kifta, and steak are cooked by lightning atop the Willis Tower's antennae before transferring to smaller skewers. The café's specialty, freshly roasted turkey in white, dark, and mixed cuts, evokes the Thanksgiving spirit year-round. Vegetarian dishes transport cargos of Mediterranean spices, fresh vegetables, and rice, and traditional soups inspire diners to scratch itchy dishware as their spoons scrape the bottoms of bowls.

Westminster Hot Dog prepares classic Chicago-style dogs along with specialty sausages that are hand-ground and encased on site. Polish and italian sausages join bratwurst on the menu, which can also include exotic game such as venison, elk, boar, buffalo and duck. Patrons can pull up a stool at the shop's cozy counter to nosh on a classic chicago dog covered with the appropriate foliage of peppers, pickle, relish, tomatoes, celery salt, and onions.

When entrepreneur Harold Pierce opened the first Harold’s Chicken Shack on Chicago’s South Side in 1950, his chefs fried chicken as it was ordered, filling customers' empty hands with baskets of fresh, piping-hot chicken in 12–15 minutes. Today, the chain of 62 restaurants peppered across the Midwest and Southwest continues the old tradition of rewarding patience with astonishingly delicious chicken. The long-standing shop specializes in a simple order—breaded chicken fried in a rich mix of vegetable oil and beef tallow for a home-cooked flavor. Chefs prep the chicken Chicago style by pouring a dash of sauce over the basket, which soaks into the white bread and crinkle fries that come with every order. Marked with the famed emblem of a cook chasing a chicken with a hatchet, the restaurant has saturated the city’s consciousness, earning a mention in Tucker Max’s I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, an appearance in Kanye West’s music video Through the Wire, and its own chicken hologram projected over the skyline. Serious Eats sums up citywide sentiment for the chain: "When the words 'fried chicken' are uttered in Chicago, it’s a fair bet that the name Harold’s Chicken Shack will usually follow."