An Uptown chef who remembers his mom by cooking her favorite shrimp dish, a popular pan-Latin restaurant in Wicker Park that reflects the chef’s cross-cultural upbringing, and an Oaxacan spot that puts family front and center in every aspect of the restaurant—some of the best Hispanic restaurants in Chicago remind us how exciting it is to eat out in the city.
For Hispanic Heritage Month, which runs from September 15 to October 15, we’re taking a closer look at four dishes at four Hispanic restaurants that celebrate the culture of the chefs and owners behind them and keep their families’ memories alive.
Read on to learn the stories behind some of the best Hispanic restaurants in Chicago, and make a booking on OpenTable.
Tlayudas at Kie-Gol-Lanee (Uptown)
Family and Oaxacan culture are everything at Uptown Mexican mainstay Kie-Gol-Lanee. Siblings and owners María and Reynel Mendoza run the restaurant along with their respective spouses, Léonides Ramos and Sandra Sotz. The restaurant’s name references the phonetic spelling of their hometown in Oaxaca, Santa María Quiegoloani. And the restaurant’s interiors are filled with personal touches—family photos, a traditional Oaxacan dress, and more.
“Going to Kie-Gol-Lanee is like walking into a small town in Oaxaca,” Reynel Mendoza says.
And it’s the food, made from family recipes passed down through generations, that’s made the restaurant a bonafide hit and a MICHELIN Bib Gourmand recipient every year since 2020. That’s pretty remarkable considering María Mendoza was initially selling handmade tamales door to door before the family opened the restaurant.
Today, Chicagoans keep coming back for Kie-Gol-Lanee’s tamales, four different kinds of mole, and other Oaxacan dishes, but it’s the tlayudas that are a runaway hit. The restaurant makes the pizza-like dish with thin corn tortillas imported weekly from family in Oaxaca. At the restaurant, it’s topped with black beans, avocado, and cheese—and you can choose from toppings like skirt steak, spiced beef, and zucchini and mushrooms. “Tlayudas are traditional to Oaxaca, like burgers to Americans and rice to Chinese,” Reynel Mendoza says.
Short rib at Kayao (Old Town)
New York’s Mission Ceviche is one of the best spots in the country to get Peruvian food, so it’s only natural that there’s been buzz around the recent Old Town opening of Kayao from the same chef.
Jose Luis Chavez was raised in Venezuela by a Peruvian father and a Colombian mother and spent years in Peru studying the country’s Chifa and Nikkei cooking traditions—informed by the large influx of Chinese and Japanese immigrants to Peru in the 19th Century.
You’ll see that knowledge reflected in so many different ways at his Chicago restaurant. It’s named after the port city in Peru, Callao, where many immigrants first arrived. And the menu is packed with cross-cultural influences highlighting Japanese techniques, like sashimi-style fish, and indigenous Peruvian ingredients, like corn. “We take the roots and stories of Peruvian cuisine and bring it to Chicago with a new interpretation,” Chavez says.
That’s perhaps best represented in the showstopping short rib dish at the restaurant. The fall-of-the-bone tender meat (thanks to a 36-hour slow-cooking process) has a soy sauce-like glaze that’s made with chicha morada, a Peruvian purple corn beverage. Eat it on a bed of pureed potatoes that gets a touch of heat from aji amarillo peppers.
Garlic shrimp at Marina’s Rum Bar & Bistro (Uptown)
When his mother died when he was 10 years old, Chicago’s Eric Roldan moved to Puerto Rico to live with his grandparents. He found comfort in the kitchen, first cooking with his grandmother and then at culinary school. But when he lost everything in Hurricane Maria in 2017, he decided to move back to Chicago.
Marina’s, which first started as a ghost kitchen in 2021, is a culmination of that journey, and where he gets to put his family’s stories and his Puerto Rican heritage front and center. “It’s very important to me to keep our traditions and culture alive, but I also wanted to elevate Puerto Rican cuisine a bit, too,” says Rodan, who named the restaurant after his mother.
You’ll see that in dishes throughout the menu, but nowhere more so than the garlic shrimp, which was his mother’s favorite dish to make. The shrimp is cooked in a buttery, sherry-infused sauce with garlic and served with mofongo, the Puerto Rican staple made with mashed fried plantains. “Marina’s is an oasis of great memories of my family,” Rodan says. “I’ve put so much love into this place.”
Piononos at Amaru (Wicker Park)
Amaru, which opened in 2019, tells the story of growing up Hispanic and American, says chef and owner Rodolfo Cuadros. The pan-Latin restaurant isn’t afraid to cross borders with influences from West Africa, Spain, the Caribbean, and countries throughout South America.
The restaurant mirrors Cuadros’s journey to leading one of Chicago’s top restaurants. He was born in New York, spent most of his childhood in Colombia, got his start in the restaurant industry washing dishes, and was mentored by legendary Miami chef Douglas Rodriguez before he branched out on his own.
“Since I’ve always been surrounded by Hispanic people, I wanted to do a restaurant that didn’t specifically need to be from one place,” Cuadros says. “At Amaru, our mission is to show to people who haven’t been to these places, the beauty of what we do.”
The restaurant’s piononos, inspired by the stuffed and fried plantain snacks that are a Puerto Rican staple, are one of the best representations of that cross-cultural celebration on the menu. Cuadros makes the dish his own by stuffing it with housemade chorizo and Oaxacan cheese and wraps it in bacon before it’s fried—a nod to his American roots. “We strive to make sure each dish has a soul to it and represents our cultures in the best way possible,” Cuadros says.
Lisa Shames is a writer focused on travel and food culture in Chicago, IL. She has covered Chicago’s restaurant scene for publications including CS, Chicago Tribune, and Time Out and is the U.S. contributor for Sogoodmag.
