Brekkie Is Served! Australia Comes to Streeterville with New Easygoing Café

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In a global food city like Chicago, it’s difficult for restaurateurs to find a new type of restaurant to introduce – but Shawn Uldridge has done it. Chapel Street Café, which just opened inside the Hilton Chicago/Magnificent Mile at 198 E. Delaware Place in Streeterville, is an Australian-style all-day café. Think healthful foods with an emphasis on breakfast, a focus on coffee roasted in-house, Australian wines, and some Aussie takes on dishes from around the world, all in a relaxed but refined environment.

“Every other city in the U.S. has an Australian café, just about,” Uldridge says. “There are tons of them in L.A. and New York, and there’s even a couple in Kansas City, Missouri and one in Salt Lake City, Utah.”

Uldridge himself is from Melbourne but has lived in Chicago since 2014, and is behind The Publishing House bed and breakfast and The Press Room wine bar in the West Loop. After a decade here, he wanted to bring the hip kind of all-day joint pioneered by his homeland to Chicago. It’s not surprising there are lots of Aussie cafés in Los Angeles; their chill vibe and healthy foods fit perfectly in the Southern California city. Jessica Koslow of L.A.’s uber-popular Sqirl even cited the late Australian restaurateur Bill Granger as responsible for the rise of the refined all-day café in America – places like Pompette or Nettare in Chicago.

Granger is often credited with popularizing avocado toast, that now quintessential brunch food, at his Sydney restaurant Bills, which was also known for light scrambled eggs, ricotta pancakes, and corn fritters. Granger foregrounded high-quality coffee; eventually Australia’s espresso-forward flat white would take off globally.

Chapel Street Café follows that mold. The breakfast menu includes avocado, scrambled eggs on toast, fluffy pancakes with mascarpone and poached pear, and zucchini and corn fritters with smoked salmon. Coffee is custom roasted behind the counter, and there is a flat white, along with other coffee and tea drinks and fresh juice.

“The flat white is fantastic,” says Uldridge. “I spent a long time with our head barista trying to test out different ways to produce the espresso and the steamed milk, and he’s really nailed it. For all the Aussies that have come in, they’ve said that they’ve been waiting for years and years to get a proper flat white in Chicago, and that this one is exactly that.”

Uldridge himself is most excited to have “proper Australian-style chicken parma,” which at Chapel Street is breaded with cornflake crumbs. “It’s basically what bars serve in place of burger” in Australia, he says. (Chapel Street does have a burger, as well as a variety of other sandwiches.) “There’s just nothing like fried chicken with marinara sauce, that and a cold pint of beer.”

Beer and wine is where Chapel Street departs a bit from a typical Aussie café, which might not serve alcohol – but all the wine is from Australia, and Fosters is available in cans. There’s also a retail space with Australian-made products.

Another touchstone for Uldridge is Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Market, where he and his parents would go on Sundays to buy food for lunch. Chapel Street’s hot jam doughnuts are inspired by a longtime vendor there, as is the borek – an Australian take on the savory filled Turkish pastry that subs fermented dough for layered flaky pastry.

Chapel Street’s lunch and dinner fare resembles what is often called “contemporary American” food, with lamb ragu, beef cheek and parsnip puree, and a soup with both artichoke and jerusalem artichoke.

“Australian cuisine is not so dissimilar to U.S. cuisine,” Uldridge says. “It’s just a little healthier and in some ways a little more creative with some of the Asian flavors. So I thought in a melting pot like Chicago it would be a great fit.”