A sweet Chicago dining guide

Sometimes you just have a craving for sweets, and Chicago certainly delivers when it comes to dessert. Chocolate, viennoiserie, ice cream, pies, multi-layered cakes and pretty plates with tweezered garnishes... whatever your heart desires. From artisan bakeries and all-day cafes to fine-dining restaurants where your meal ends on a crescendo, here are the best places in Chicago to satisfy your sweet tooth and insider tips on what to order.

Daisies

_{Mara Faye}

Executive pastry chef Leigh Omilinsky has been tempting Chicagoans with her delectable plated desserts at some of Chicago's best hotels and restaurants for over a decade. Now, she partners with chef Joe Frillman at Logan Square pastry and pasta emporium Daisies to oversee plated desserts at dinner and run a daytime bakery and cafe. Many of the pastries and ice creams feature seasonal produce from Frillman's family farm, like the apple cider doughnut cake with rum-poached apples, mint stracciatella ice cream and peanut butter cream puff with concord grape sorbet. Many of Omilinsky's desserts also lean into Midwestern nostalgia, with perennial fan favourites like her gooey butter cake, oatmeal cream pie and chocolate bar with puppy chow and pretzel ice cream.

Kindling

_{Alejandra Romo, Fifty 50 Group}

Chris Teixeira, Executive Pastry Chef for the Fifty/50 Restaurant Group, is famous for his cake balls and cannabis-infused cake and brownie mixes at West Town Bakery, but at Kindling his playful desserts are a little more refined. The 500-seat restaurant in Willis Tower boasts the largest wood-fired grills in the city, and fire plays a role even in dessert. Teixeira's signature s'mores cake bar has a brûléed  Italian marshmallow meringue that arrives at the table still smoking right after being torched, so you get the immediate smell of toasted marshmallows. His maple flapjack cake is another showstopper, flavoured with vanilla and maple. “I'm a huge fan of breakfast for dinner,” he says.

Miru

_{Allison Gallese}

Pastry chef Juan Gutierrez steals the show at the St. Regis Chicago's signature restaurant, infusing Asian flavours into each dessert to complement Miru's pan-Asian culinary theme, including candied ginger cookies and calamansi crème brûlée. You might know him as the champion of Netflix's School of Chocolate and his chocolate silk tart with matcha ice cream and salted chocolate caramel won't disappoint. The most memorable dessert of all is a monochromatic black sesame mochi, contrasting black sesame ice cream with a warm homemade mochi sponge cake that's so wonderfully stretchy and soft the suspicion is the Colombian chef was Japanese in a past life.

Gathers Tea Bar

_{Sandy Noto}

Partners Victor Lei and Peter Li merge Michelin-star fine dining training and a steadfast dedication to sourcing the highest quality ingredients from Taiwan and Japan (including matcha and hojicha from Uji, Kyoto) to serve the best bubble tea in Chicago at Gathers Tea Bar. Toppings like boba and grass jelly are cooked fresh throughout the day and premium teas are brewed to order, with an impeccable eye for detail. Their boba has a more QQ or al-dente bite than that in basic bubble tea chains and is sweetened with brown sugar. There are always seasonal drink specials too, like ginger milk tea and longan honey yuzu osmanthus oolong for the winter season.

Publican Quality Bread

_{Kelly Sandos}

After nearly a decade operating as Chicago’s premier wholesale bakery, supplying bread to the best restaurants in town, James Beard Award-winning baker Greg Wade opened Publican Quality Bread bakery in West Town last year, with a grab-and-go café and retail counter offering decadent pastries, from-scratch sandwiches, and a full coffee bar. Sweet treats like kouign amann, chocolate brioche morning buns, tiramisu cruffins, and pistachio and amarena cherry-filled maritozzi are worth getting up early for. The selection changes all the time and sells out quickly, but sweets are replenished throughout the day with trays fresh from the oven.

Adalina

_{Matthew Reeves}

Save room for dessert at this glamorous Italian restaurant in the Gold Coast neighbourhood. Pastry chef Nicole Guini previously oversaw desserts at Michelin-starred Blackbird before opening Adalina in 2021. She always has a modern tiramisu twist on the menu. The current winter rendition is made with bourbon-soaked lady fingers and layered with dark chocolate mascarpone mousse and smoked vanilla gelato with a cocoa lotus flower tuile garnish. At brunch, Guini's crostatas are a sweet staple, whether it's strawberry rhubarb in the spring, roasted peach for summer, caramel apple in autumn or fig for winter.

Lost Larson

Lost Larson has two charming cafes in Andersonville and Wicker Park, and also offers both pick-up and delivery from both locations so you can get sweets delivered directly to your hotel. Pastry chef Bobby Schaffer worked in multiple Michelin-starred kitchens before opening this Swedish bakery with his sister, paying homage to their Scandinavian roots with cardamom buns, cloudberry preserves and lingonberry almond cakes. Schaffer mills all his own flour for bread and pastries and the tebirkes – a Danish speciality croissant covered in poppy seeds and stuffed with almond cream – is a must try.

Sepia

Michelin-starred Sepia offers a four-course prix fixe dinner menu and choosing which of pastry chef Erin Kobler's desserts to order is one of the most difficult decisions of the evening. Hopefully, your dining companions are amenable to sharing so you can try the sticky toffee pudding and the toasted brown sugar pavlova with kabocha squash. Pavlova has become Kobler's signature dessert – she always has a seasonal variation on the menu. “It's texturally interesting – crispy on the outside with a marshmallowy centre – and fun to eat when you crack into the meringue and shatter the crisp shell with your spoon,” she says. Meringue is a blank slate to fold freeze-dried fruit, pulverised seeds, dried herbs, extracts or even miso powder into.