The Chicago Restaurant Index · June 2026
What Chicago is opening.
A monthly count of restaurant openings, taken from the City of Chicago’s own business-licence record and classified with the same model that scores an address. It covers openings only — the method section explains why nobody, including us, can honestly count closures on a monthly basis.
Openings by month
Every complete month in the record for the last two years. The most recent month is highlighted.
Concepts gaining and losing ground
Share of all openings in the trailing 12 months against the 12 before, in percentage points. Share rather than count, because a category can open more places and still be losing ground. Categories with fewer than 20 openings across both windows are left out — at that size a swing is two restaurants, not a trend.
| Concept | Openings | Year before | Share change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Italian / Pizza | 37 | 23 | +1.9pp |
| Bakery / Dessert | 45 | 33 | +1.6pp |
| Breakfast / Diner | 16 | 7 | +1.2pp |
| American / Burger | 41 | 34 | +0.8pp |
| Bar / Tavern | 24 | 18 | +0.8pp |
| Mexican | 50 | 64 | −2.3pp |
| Japanese / Sushi | 14 | 21 | −1.1pp |
| Coffee / Cafe | 88 | 92 | −1.0pp |
| Catering / Events | 9 | 15 | −0.9pp |
| Latin / Caribbean | 14 | 14 | −0.1pp |
Where they are opening
The same comparison by community area.
| Community area | Openings | Year before | Share change |
|---|---|---|---|
| WICKER PARK | 25 | 11 | +1.9pp |
| HUMBOLDT PARK | 17 | 6 | +1.5pp |
| AUSTIN | 18 | 9 | +1.2pp |
| WEST RIDGE | 20 | 15 | +0.6pp |
| PORTAGE PARK | 12 | 9 | +0.4pp |
| BELMONT CRAGIN | 12 | 21 | −1.4pp |
| ROGERS PARK | 7 | 16 | −1.4pp |
| UPTOWN | 9 | 15 | −0.9pp |
| LINCOLN SQUARE | 14 | 19 | −0.8pp |
| LOWER WEST SIDE | 11 | 16 | −0.8pp |
Method, and why there are no closures here
An opening is a record: a business licence is issued, and it appears. A closure is an inference, and a slow one. A restaurant goes dark long before its licence lapses, and the health inspection that confirms the space is empty arrives later still.
We measured how slow, against a cohort of 4,292 Chicago restaurants whose outcomes are now fully known. One year after a closure, the public record reveals 18% of them. At two years, 33%. Detection is only complete at three years.
So a monthly tracker that put openings against closures would compare a near-complete number with one that is missing four fifths of its subject, and would report Chicago gaining restaurants every single month. It would be wrong, and it would be wrong in the flattering direction. That is why this page counts one thing and says so.
Survival is a separate question with a separate answer: the concept-fit model estimates it for a specific concept at a specific address, validated out-of-time on openings it never saw. This index deliberately does not compute its own version — two implementations of the same number are two numbers waiting to disagree.
Counts exclude licences that are not restaurants, and consolidate the paper duplicates that appear when a second licence at one address is folded into the first. A month is published only once the record extends past its final day, so the most recent month is never a partial one. Figures are regenerated monthly from the same artefacts the product scores from.
Licence record through 2026-07-27. Index generated 2026-08-01. Free to cite with a link.
- Chicago licenses
- never
- Google enrichment
- never