Our Story
History
On September 2, 1999 Lula Cafe opened in a small storefront on Kedzie Boulevard with a four burner home stove and a dented collection of thrifted pots and pans. Today, stretching three storefronts, it is the founding member of the nationally recognized Logan Square culinary community and a celebrated forerunner of the ‘farm to table’ movement in Chicago.
With self taught chefs and a willingness to cook against categorization, the menu at Lula has grown into a kind of humble maturity, risky but grounded, a boheme bistro of the unclassifiable kind. We invite you for all occasions, to read a book at the bar with a glass of wine, to celebrate birthdays and first dates, to taste through the seasons, to brunch with friends after a night out. Anything is possible, welcomed, wished for, here at Lula.
We serve a brunch that is casual, simple yet sophisticated, with ingredients like fresh farm eggs and porridges made from cornmeal ground at a local mill. Besides the daily offering of meats and fish from sustainable sources, every day we serve adventurous fare for vegetarians. While at dinner the food is more intricate and formal, we never cede the accessibility and youthfulness with which Lula was begun.
Chef Jason Hammel has been nominated three times as a finalist for James Beard Best Chef Great Lakes. His cookbook, The Lula Cafe Cookbook, was released in the Fall of 2023 by Phaidon.
We have been featured on NPR’s “This American Life,” in The New York Times, Food and Wine, Bon Appetit, and in Chicago press where Lula has been named an LTH Forum Great Neighborhood Restaurant, a Michelin Bib Gourmande, Jean Banchet Best Neighborhood Restaurant, and a proud member of the “Eater Essential 38.”
Please join us.
Lula Family
Jason Hammel
Cofounder and Executive Chef
Chef and owner Jason Hammel grew up in New Haven, CT and is the product of a tight Italian family. He studied writing at Brown University and then traveled in Italy where an accidental stay in an apartment above a produce market left a lasting impact and presaged his career as a chef. Upon returning to the U.S., he received his M.A. in English and moved to Chicago where he met his wife, musician and Lula co-founder, Amalea Tshilds. They live in Logan Square with their two children, Ismene and Cass.
Hammel’s writing has appeared in Bon Appetit and Lucky Peach/MAD feed. His cookbook, THE LULA CAFE COOKBOOK: COLLECTED RECIPES AND STORIES, was released by Phaidon Press in October 2023.
Amalea Tshilds
Cofounder and Owner
Amalea Tshilds has been rooted in Chicago her whole life, apart from her years at Bard, where she studied painting and music. In 1999 she opened Lula Cafe with Jason Hammel. Together they wrote the menus and created dishes that have lasted twenty-seven years, among them her grandmother's Pasta Yiayia, a dish she grew up with and one that still carries the comfort and the love of cooking she learned at that table. Her hand shaped the spirit of hospitality Lula is known for. Amalea stepped back from the day-to-day to raise their two children and to keep playing live music, releasing two solo records, Painted Tiles and Love on the Ground. At LOULOU by Lula, the restaurant's event space, she hosts L'Soirée, an intimate, salon-style gathering where performance, stories, and conversation unfold together over a communal meal by the Lula Cafe team. Each evening centers on a featured artist and another artist of their choosing, and takes the shape those two make of it.
Jason and Amalea were recipients of the 2026 James Beard Award For Hospitality.