Restaurants in Elgin, IL

Elgin's 114,701 residents are paired with 330 places listed in this guide, made up of 253 restaurants, 28 quick service spots, 26 cafes and 20 bars. Mexican is the top category at 43, followed by Desserts and ice cream at 32 and Coffee shops and cafes at 28 in the listings.

Elgin records 28.8 listed places per 10,000 residents, which is below the 41.8 median for all cities in this guide. The figure is a snapshot of the listings here, not a census of the city's venues.

212 listings are independent; the chains that show up most are Subway (10), Dunkin' (9), Baskin-Robbins (7) and Starbucks (5).

In the Servestack Independent Restaurant Index, Elgin ranks #158 of 332 large US cities for the share of places that are independent.

Food in Elgin by cuisine

Own a restaurant in Elgin?

299 of the 330 places here (91%) list a website. When a guest searches for food in Elgin and lands on a delivery app instead of your site, the app takes a commission on the order and shows them your competitors. Servestack gives you your own ordering site with zero commission, POS sync and loyalty, and Studio makes the menus, flyers and posts to promote it. See what you would keep with the commission savings calculator, or browse the restaurant marketing guides.

Place data from the Overture Maps Foundation (overturemaps.org), which includes data from Meta, Microsoft and Foursquare, used under the CDLA Permissive 2.0 and Apache 2.0 licenses. Restaurants open, close and move; check with the restaurant before you go. Data refreshed 2026-10-11.