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Home / Businesses / Sikia

Sikia

Iconic/NotableEnglewood · African Diaspora / Fine Dining Community-sourced, unverified
📍 740 W 63rd St, Chicago, IL 60621

Sikia is Englewood's only fine-dining restaurant, and it's run entirely by students — a white-tablecloth dining room inside Kennedy-King College, staffed and cooked by culinary and hospitality students from the school's Washburne Culinary & Hospitality Institute as a living classroom rather than a side project.

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Englewood's only fine-dining restaurant — a student-run teaching kitchen (Kennedy-King College) serving African-diaspora dishes at genuinely affordable prices.

It first opened in 2008, closed for five years when COVID hit, and reopened to the public on January 30, 2025 — a gap college president Katonja Webb Walker described plainly: “When Sikia closed in response to the COVID pandemic, our students still needed a space to learn.” The menu pulls from across the African diaspora rather than sticking to one lane — an African ambrosia salad with mango, red onion, and yams, black-eyed-pea fritters with red pepper sauce, vegan mac and cheese, and a crème brûlée for dessert, all built by students who are a semester or two from running their own kitchens. One senior, Christopher Randle, said he wants to be a professional chef and private chef; a graduating student, Adrienne Gordan, put the stakes plainly: “A full-time job and holding a full-time position here in school didn't seem possible, but here I am, four years later.”

That's the real draw here — not just a meal, but watching Chicago's next generation of chefs cook it. It's lunch service by reservation only, and the price tier stays genuinely affordable despite the white-tablecloth setup, since this is a teaching kitchen, not a margin-chasing business. No discount special to speak of — the whole restaurant is, in a sense, already a kind of civic deal: real fine dining in a neighborhood that otherwise doesn't have any.

Specials at Sikia

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Sikia

Iconic/Notable
African-Diaspora Teaching Kitchen
EnglewoodCommunity

Hours

Lunch service by reservation (call ahead to confirm current semester schedule)
📅 Takes reservations 🥡 Takeout unconfirmed 📞 (773) 602-5200

Amenities & accessibility

📅Reservations accepted
❔Takeout: unverified
♿Wheelchair accessible

Location

🧭 Apple Maps 📍 Google Maps

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