Brûlée: Chicago’s Black Woman-Owned Brunch Restaurant Where Southern Soul Meets South Loop Sophistication

Emani Nicole Roberts never planned to own a restaurant. She planned to be a private chef — and she was a great one. She cooked for celebrities. She toured with New Edition. She built a following in Atlanta and Chicago for brunch spreads that people drove across the city to get to. When her mother, Shronda Dunn, finally convinced her to stop cooking for other people’s tables and build one of her own, Roberts did what she always does: she went all in.

Brûlée opened in November 2025 at 2036 S. Michigan Avenue in Chicago’s South Loop — inside a building that once housed the Studebaker showroom on Motor Row, a corridor later transformed by Muddy Waters, Etta James, Chess Records, and Vee-Jay Records, the largest Black-owned record label in America before Motown. The address carries history. So does the food.

Roberts studied culinary arts at Kendall College in Chicago, refined her craft at Walt Disney World, and spent nearly a decade in Atlanta apprenticing under chef Virgil Harper — an experience that deepened her connection to Black foodways and solidified her philosophy of what brunch should be. “When I moved to Atlanta,” she says, “that’s when I really leaned into breakfast and brunch.” The result is a menu that takes Southern hospitality and elevates every element without apologizing for the richness of it.

At Brûlée, avocado toast comes on a croissant. French toast arrives with a caramelized sugar crust. Chicken and waffles are finished with vanilla cream. And the dish that has already put Brûlée on Chicago’s culinary map — fried lobster tails on a sweet potato waffle with salted caraline praline sauce — is the kind of thing Roberts describes plainly: “You’re not going anywhere else in Chicago that’s going to have that.” She’s right.

The team that makes it possible is family — biological and chosen. Shronda Dunn, Roberts’ mother, is a co-owner and Brûlée’s general manager. Kennedy Bufford, chef de cuisine, started as Roberts’ mentee nearly a decade ago; today, Roberts says, “You literally wouldn’t be able to tell if I cooked it or if Kennedy cooked it.” The front of the house leads with the warmth that Roberts built her reputation on, and the coffee program — anchored by a crème brûlée latte — gives the space the café energy she always wanted alongside the full-scale brunch menu her mother pushed her toward.

Brûlée has been described by The Infatuation as a restaurant shaped by “Walt Disney World training and years as a sought-after event chef,” and reviewed by Resy as a place where “Chicago’s brunch scene is better for it.” The South Loop has needed something like this — a Black woman-owned, chef-driven space that is both approachable and elevated, dressed in black and white with marble-and-gold flourishes, a wide bar, velvet couches, and a selfie-ready floral wall. Roberts is already brainstorming what a second location could look like.

For now, the first is plenty. Come hungry.

bruleechicago.com · @bruleechicago 📍 2036 S. Michigan Ave, Chicago, IL 60616 Open daily except Wednesday · 8am–4pm · Reservations recommended on weekends