The 7 Best Coffee Shops In Chicago

While there’s plenty of important things to discover when you get to a new city, for many the priority is a really good cup of coffee. Chicago coffee is as good as it gets and with so much choice out there we wanted to whittle it down to the seven best.

These are the Chicago coffee shops that you simply can’t afford to ignore; if time permits you’ll want to visit every single one of them.

The 7 Best Coffee Shops In Chicago, How do these rankings work?

1. Fairgrounds Coffee & Tea

A stand-out coffee store in Chicago, Fairgrounds serves a fifty-fifty ratio of both coffee and tea, but it’s the coffee that will have you coming back to either of their five Chicago locations. The stores are beautifully designed, and super Instagrammable.

They even have eight rotating cold brews on draft, as well as their own matcha tea bar, if that’s more up your street.

2. Intelligentsia Coffee Millennium Park

Handily located between Chicago’s thriving Michigan and Wabash Avenues this is their third Chicago location. The post-industrial decor echoes the art and structure of nearby Millennium Park. They roast their own coffee, train up the next generation of baristas and are genuinely about as passionate about coffee as anybody you are ever likely to meet.

3. Sawada Coffee

The first U.S. coffee shop of world renowned barista and latte art expert Hiroshi Sawada. The industrial style café features a wall of windows facing Green Street and includes a custom painted espresso machine, wooden ping pong table, pinball machine, and punching bag.

Look out for their sister location in New York if you are there.

4. Metric Coffee Co.

Metric Coffee roasts all their beans on a vintage ’61 Probat roaster, so you can look forward to exceptionally well balanced, sweet, and clean coffees here. They do free public cuppings on Fridays at 10:30am, so you can enjoy their coffee and learn a thing or two.

5. Bridgeport Coffee House

Stop by the original location in Bridgeport, where the lovely cafe is located in a wood-paneled former pharmacy. They serve up fairtrade and organic products and roast all of their own beans, with a regularly changing rota of roasts.

6. Heritage Bicycle Company

Heritage is a mash-up of two concepts and cultures that go hand in hand: bikes and coffee. Part bicycle store, part coffee store, you can browse for vintage bike parts, get your bicycle repaired or simply pop in for some great coffee. They brew up rich, full-flavored award-winning Heritage coffee beans, roasted locally.

7. Gaslight Coffee Roasters

An independently owned coffee shop and wholesale roaster in the Logan Square neighborhood of Chicago. Gaslight Coffee Roasters put huge effort and pride into sourcing their beans and the roasting process.

Keep an eye out for their great food and their beans in some other great stores around the city.

Want even more choice? Check out our ranking of the 50 best coffee shops in America.