A Decadent Southern Brunch Restaurant from a Mother-Daughter Team Opens in the South Loop

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Brunch is already a decadent meal. At Brûlée, a new Southern brunch restaurant opening November 6 in the South Loop, brunch dishes are luxed out in a grand space with lots of gold and black. It’s not just french toast; it’s a crème brûlée version with a caramelized sugar crust. You want chicken and waffles? You’ll get vanilla cream with it. Or you can max out with a surf version featuring fried lobster tails on a sweet potato waffle with salted caramel praline sauce. Avocado toast comes on a croissant; crab dip is topped with broiled cheese; grilled cheese has smoked brisket on it. 

“You’re not going anywhere else in Chicago that’s going to have that,” says Emani Roberts about the lobster tail and waffle dish, one of her specialties. 

Roberts and her mother are the team behind Brûlée, which marks their first foray into the restaurant world together. Roberts’ dad’s side of the family owns barbecue restaurants and she is a private chef who thought she might someday open a coffee shop when she tired of the “hustle and bustle” of serving personal clients. Her mother pushed her to a bigger vision of a brunch restaurant open 8:00 am to 4:00 pm every day but Wednesday – but Roberts still gets her coffee shop vibe at the front of the space, with housemade to-go pastries, fresh juice, and espresso drinks – yes, there’s a crème brûlée latte – from the bar.

Sous chef Kennedy Bufford is responsible for the syrups that flavor drinks like a lavender rose matcha, as well as a number of the dishes on the menu. Bufford reached out to Roberts years ago on Instagram asking Roberts to mentor her as a chef. Almost a decade later, “You literally wouldn’t be able to tell if I cooked it or if Kennedy cooked it,” Roberts says.

She herself benefited from a devoted mentorship that exposed her to the Southern Black cooking she only knew from a few dishes her family would make for Thanksgiving. After taking cooking classes at Homewood-Flossmor High School in the south suburbs and studying culinary arts at Kendall College in Chicago, she went to work at Disney World in Orlando and then moved to Atlanta, where she met the chef Virgil Harper. A three-month internship turned into seven years working for him.

“The culture is just so different than Chicago,” she says of Atlanta. “That’s where I learned the gumbo, I learned the oxtails, I learned the real collard greens. I just grew appreciation for it because it’s my roots.”

She eventually started work as a private chef and moved back to Chicago, where she also began catering parties and building a following for her food. She’s still the private chef for Monique Rodriguez, the founder of the Northwest Indiana-based Black beauty product juggernaut Mielle Organics. 

When her mother pushed her to open a restaurant, they turned to the South Loop, which is full of residences but less so of restaurants. The location at 2036 S. Michigan Ave., blocks away from McCormick Place, Wintrust Arena, and the hotels that serve them, is also ideally placed to serve convention-goers in search of a hearty meal. 

Years after her mother worried about her going to culinary school, her mother is now fully embracing her career path, teaming up with her daughter to open a restaurant together. Roberts says, “My mom was like, Emani, we need to do a breakfast restaurant!”