Kasama

Kasama runs two businesses out of one corner building in Ukrainian Village. From Wednesday to Sunday, 9am to 3pm, it is a counter-service Filipino bakery and cafe - longganisa breakfast sandwiches, ube crinkle cookies, pastries - with the kitchen and dining room open until 2pm or capacity. From Thursday to Sunday evening it converts into a reservation-only fine-dining room serving a Filipino-inspired tasting menu at $325. The restaurant holds two MICHELIN stars as of 2025, won a James Beard Foundation Award in 2023 and appeared on North America's 50 Best Restaurants in 2025, and it is the rare Chicago room that carries that weight while still selling coffee and pastry over a counter in the morning.

For non-drinkers the significant fact is the pairing structure. Kasama publishes three prices against the tasting menu - the menu itself at $325, a beverage pairing at $195 and a non-alcoholic pairing at $95 - which puts the alcohol-free option on the same page and in the same format as the wine. That is a materially different proposition from a restaurant that will improvise something if asked: it means the kitchen has designed a full sequence of drinks to run the length of the meal. Resy's November 2022 guide to the city's non-alcoholic cocktails documented what that has looked like in practice, describing a bright yuzu highball, a Beekeeper built as a riff on a bee's knees with clarified watermelon, lemon and honey, and a Toddy-mansi, an alcohol-free hot toddy of genmaicha tea and calamansi juice, plus an Ube Fizz using a distilled non-alcoholic spirit. Those specific drinks date from 2022 and the pairing changes with the menu, so treat them as an indication of the house style rather than a current order list; the $95 pairing itself is listed on the restaurant's own site today.