Perilla

A Mural, a Kitchen, and a Genre Worth Paying Attention To

Walk into Perilla at 225 N Wabash Ave and the first thing you register is a large mural of Michelle Obama dressed in a hanbok. It is a confident opening statement: this is not a restaurant that blurs its references. The room follows through, greenery, edgy light fixtures, artwork spread across walls with purpose rather than decoration, and large windows that frame the street outside. The kitchen is semi-open. The city is visible. The vibe lands somewhere between urbane and deliberate, the kind of room that signals the kitchen is serious without asking you to treat dinner as a ceremony.

That framing matters, because the genre Perilla is working in, Modern British cooking inflected with Korean technique and pantry, is one that the American dining scene has spent years trying to define. In New York, Atomix has refined Korean fine dining into a form that earns consistent placement among the country's most decorated tables. In Chicago, the conversation is different: more neighbourhood-rooted, less vertical. Perilla sits at an interesting intersection of these two tendencies, holding a Michelin Bib Gourmand (2024) alongside a Star Wine List #1 ranking (2025) and an Opinionated About Dining placement at #377 in 2024, rising to #421 in 2025. The OAD trajectory is worth noting, since its rankings draw on working chefs and food professionals.

How the Meal is Structured

The dining ritual at Perilla follows a rhythm that borrows from Korean communal eating while keeping the pacing of a contemporary Western dinner. Tables arrive with banchan, the small side dishes that define Korean table culture, before the larger plates appear. This sequencing is not merely decorative. In Korean dining tradition, banchan serve as both palate context and accompaniment throughout the meal, eaten alongside rather than before the main event. At Perilla, that tradition functions as the structural spine of the experience, setting the Korean register clearly before the menu moves into territory more associated with British and American approaches.

From that foundation, the kitchen layers in dishes that work across those registers. Wagyu beef tartare arrives with Asian pear, a pairing that plays sweet acidity against the richness of raw beef, a move with clear roots in Korean flavour logic. Kimchi stew with glass noodles pulls from the deep fermented pantry that defines Korean winter cooking. Fire chicken with Chihuahua cheese pushes further, using a Mexican-American ingredient to add a molten dairy counterweight to the chile heat. Even the fried chicken, perhaps the most travelled dish in global gastronomy at this point, gets restructured here with ranch and pickled radish, landing somewhere between American diner and Korean chimaek. The thread running through all of it is seasoning confidence: this is a kitchen that trusts acidity and fermentation rather than leaning on fat and richness as default tools.

For those tracking the evolution of Korean-American cooking across the country, Perilla represents a Chicago-specific version of that conversation. Chicago's dining identity has historically been defined by its progressive American kitchens, Alinea, Smyth, Oriole, and Next Restaurant setting a high-concept American baseline, but the city's newer wave has moved toward rooted, culturally specific cooking. Kasama, operating in the Filipino register, is part the same shift. Perilla, working in a Modern British and Korean frame, belongs to the same structural tendency: cuisine-led restaurants that treat a specific food culture as the primary argument rather than technique or concept.

The Wine Program and the Tea Cellar

Perilla earned a Star Wine List #1 ranking in 2025, placing its wine program in a serious parallel to the kitchen. The list holds its own editorial point of view, a meaningful credential given that Star Wine List evaluates depth, range, and curatorial intent rather than simply size or prestige labels.

The tea cellar menu, offered in lieu of dessert, is a structural choice. In Korea and Britain both, the end of a meal carries its own ritual weight: the Korean tea tradition is slow, botanical, and grounding; British service has its own post-dinner codes. Perilla's decision to offer a tea programme rather than a conventional dessert course aligns the close of the meal with that dual inheritance, and it signals something about how seriously the kitchen is thinking about the full arc of the experience rather than just the dishes in the middle.

Peer Context: Where Perilla Sits

At a $$ price point against a comparable set that runs uniformly at $$$$, Perilla occupies a different value position than most of its comparably credentialed counterparts. The Bib Gourmand category is specifically designed to recognise this tier, Michelin's designation for restaurants where quality and value intersect. That positioning makes it a different kind of decision from booking Alinea or Smyth: less occasion-specific, more repeatable.

Planning Your Visit

Perilla operates at 225 N Wabash Ave, Chicago, IL 60601, in the downtown Loop area. Service runs Tuesday through Thursday from 6 to 10 pm; Friday and Saturday offer both a lunch service from 12:30 to 2:30 pm and dinner from 6 to 10 pm; Sunday runs 12:30 to 8:30 pm. The restaurant is closed on Mondays. The downtown location and the Loop's transit access mean the restaurant is direct to reach from most Chicago hotels.

What to Order at Perilla

The banchan that open the meal set the kitchen's flavour logic, so eat them alongside the main courses rather than clearing them before they arrive. The Wagyu beef tartare with Asian pear and the kimchi stew with glass noodles represent the clearest expressions of the Korean-British synthesis: both dishes have legible roots in one tradition, reshaped by ingredients or technique from the other. For those who want to track the kitchen's range, the fire chicken with Chihuahua cheese pushes further into cross-cultural territory, and the fried chicken with ranch and pickled radish rewards comparison with its more conventional versions elsewhere. Close the meal with the tea cellar menu rather than defaulting to dessert, it is the most considered part of the ending, and the selection reflects the same dual inheritance that runs through everything else on the table.

Chef Ben Marks holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand and a Star Wine List #1 (2025), with OAD peer recognition confirming the kitchen's standing among industry professionals. See our full Chicago dining coverage for broader context on how this restaurant fits into the city's current dining map.