Chicago Restaurants: Chicago's Best Italian Restaurant

Chicago restaurants offer some of the best and most lauded culinary experiences in the country. There are many restaurants in Chicago, from seafood restaurants to steakhouses to Italian restaurants. The Italian restaurants in Chicago are in the top tier of Chicago's best restaurants. Tourists to Chicago can rest easy knowing there is great Italian food and are some great Italian restaurants in Chicago.

 

Chicago's best Italian food is found at Spiaggia, which was featured on The Daily Meal's list of America's 40 Best Italian Restaurants.

 

Decades before the likes of Mario Batali and Michael White brought us the most recent wave of fine Italian dining, Tony Mantuano taught Chicagoans how to enjoy refined Italian fare at Spiaggia. Appropriately given its name, which means "beach" in Italian, the food and décor at the restaurant are inspired by the coast. Mantuano has won countless accolades for his accomplishments here including the 2005 James Beard Award for Best Chef in the Midwest. Chris Marchino took over for longtime executive chef Sarah Grueneberg last year and hasn't skipped a beat, continuing to delight diners with such fare as Pugliese burrata with golden Osetra caviar and potato crisps; squid ink spaghetti with Maine lobster and toasted breadcrumbs; and wood-roasted steelhead trout with honey mussels, black garlic, butter-roasted turnips, and Meyer lemon.

 

To assemble this ranking for America's 40 Best Italians Restaurants, we looked at restaurants that made it to our list of the 101 Best Restaurants in America, which we release early every year. The steps we took to build that ranking were as thorough and comprehensive as possible: We recruited an illustrious panel of judges that included some of the country's top food writers, critics, and bloggers to submit their suggestions for the country's best restaurants, which we supplemented with our own choices, including previous years' rankings as well as lauded newcomers. This list of hundreds of restaurants was then built into a survey that was sent out to more than 100 panelists, who voted for their favorites. The final ranking included a significant number of Italian restaurants, and to create thislist we supplemented the Italian restaurants that made it into our final list of 101 with those that came in as runners-up and those that were featured on this year's list of the country's 50 best casual restaurants; all places worthy of renown.