Superkhana International

Logan Square's Indian Counter on Its Own Terms

Along West Diversey Avenue, where Logan Square shades into Avondale, exposed white brick and warehouse floors signal the kind of room that takes its food seriously without performing seriousness at the door. Superkhana International's long bar anchors one side of the space; light moves through the room with enough ease that the lunch window crowd and the dinner counter crowd occupy the same register. The physical environment is airy rather than spare, a distinction that matters when the food asks for close attention.

The broader Indian dining scene in American cities has historically polarized between white-tablecloth fine dining and neighborhood curry houses, with little in between. Over the past decade, a third current has emerged: chef-driven, mid-price Indian restaurants that treat subcontinent technique as a starting point rather than a constraint. ROOP Chicago occupies the higher end of that register, while Superkhana International holds a position that is deliberately less formal and more promiscuous in its references.

The Architecture of the Bread Program

Any serious reading of Superkhana International's menu begins with the naan, not because bread is incidental to Indian cooking, it has never been, but because the kitchen uses it as the clearest statement of intent. In northern Indian tradition, naan baked in a tandoor carries a textural contract: blistered char on the surface, soft and yielding interior, enough structure to scoop without tearing. That contract holds here, but what gets placed on or inside the bread is where the kitchen diverges.

Salted jalapeños and mozzarella as a naan topping sit at the intersection of Indian flatbread culture and the American tendency to treat good bread as a delivery mechanism for anything worthwhile. The butter chicken calzone, brushed with ghee and finished with Maldon salt, reads as a different kind of proposition: the dum principle, which traps steam to meld flavors inside a sealed vessel, translated into Italian form. Dum cooking, most associated with biryani but present across Mughlai and Awadhi traditions, relies on the seal to concentrate and marry what's inside. The calzone functions on the same logic. The analogy is not forced, ghee and Maldon salt on the exterior signal that the kitchen is thinking about layers rather than novelty.

That layering instinct connects directly to biryani's fundamental architecture: base aromatics cooked down, protein braised in spice, rice parcooked separately, then the whole assembled and sealed for dum. Each stage is irreducible; skip one and the final dish loses depth. Superkhana's approach to its bread program shows the same structural thinking applied to a different format.

The Rest of the Menu

The Kerala crab curry with flaky parotta represents a different register entirely. Kerala's coastal tradition builds curries on coconut milk, curry leaf, and black pepper, a spice profile that is less about heat than about aromatic complexity. Parotta, the South Indian laminated flatbread made by folding ghee into dough repeatedly until it achieves distinct layers, has become something of a benchmark dish in Chicago's Indian scene for good reason: the technique is demanding and the result is immediately legible to anyone who has eaten it in Kerala or Tamil Nadu. That Superkhana carries both the curry and the parotta in the same line signals kitchen range.

The chana chaat with tamarind and spice sits in the category of Indian street food that has proven particularly resistant to fine-dining translation. Chaat works on the tension between sweet, sour, spice, and crunch, remove any one and it deflates. The fact that it lands among the kitchen's stronger dishes suggests that chefs Zeeshan Shah and Yoshi Yamada are comfortable with the format's demands, not just its aesthetics.

Five Years, Multiple Pivots, Consistent Recognition

Superkhana International spent five years operating through pop-ups and kitchen changes before arriving at its current format. That kind of trajectory tends to produce one of two outcomes: a restaurant with a developed point of view refined through iteration, or one that has lost its thread entirely. The 2024 Michelin Bib Gourmand, awarded to restaurants offering high-quality cooking at a price point that does not require advance financial planning, suggests the former.

At $$, Superkhana International occupies a markedly different position from the high-end Indian addresses making noise internationally. Trèsind Studio in Dubai and Opheem in Birmingham both push Indian cooking into tasting-menu territory with entirely different budget requirements. Superkhana's value sits in the Bib Gourmand's own logic: the food is doing interesting things, and you don't need a tasting-menu budget to encounter it.

Chicago's broader restaurant scene runs from the four-star progressive American rooms, Alinea, Smyth, Oriole, down through a wide mid-market where the interesting cooking increasingly happens. Kasama has shown how a Filipino-rooted kitchen can operate a two-register model effectively. Superkhana's model is single-register but flexible across dayparts: the lunchtime takeout window offering sandwiches extends the format without diluting the dinner proposition.

Planning Your Visit

Superkhana International is at 3059 W Diversey Ave in Logan Square. Google reviewers rate it 4.5 across 537 reviews.

If you are building a longer trip around ambitious cooking at other price points, consider Le Bernardin in New York, Lazy Bear in San Francisco, The French Laundry in Napa, Single Thread Farm in Healdsburg, Providence in Los Angeles, or Emeril's in New Orleans.