Khyber Pass

The Restaurant

Khyber Pass opened at 1031 Lake Street on the western edge of the Hemingway District as one of the Chicago region's longer-running North-Indian restaurants — a working tradition kitchen that has anchored the village's mid-price dining identity for the better part of two decades. The room — about ninety covers across a main dining hall with deep booth seating along the eastern wall, a small front bar, and a back room that handles the team-dinner format — runs the warm-toned Indian-restaurant architecture that the format calls for, with a working tandoor visible from the dining hall's open-pass and the spice-rack-and-copper-pot working visual of a serious tradition kitchen.

The menu reads as the complete North-Indian-and-Mughlai working tradition rather than the abbreviated curry-house format. The starters include a tandoori chicken plate marinated overnight in yogurt and the kitchen's tandoor-masala spice blend, a daily samosa with mint chutney, the paneer-tikka skewer cooked in the tandoor, a vegetable pakora plate, and the daily aloo-chaat appetiser. The tandoor programme — central to the room's working identity — runs through dinner service: chicken tikka, seekh kabab, the daily lamb-chop tandoori, a tandoori shrimp, and the kitchen's naan programme that turns out plain, butter, garlic, peshwari, and the daily-stuffed working version. The curry list carries the complete tradition shortlist: chicken tikka masala, lamb rogan josh, the daily seasonal vegetable korma, a saag paneer, a daily dal, a chicken vindaloo for the heat-tolerant table, and a Hyderabadi biryani.

The weekday lunch buffet — the room's working anchor for Oak Park's office-and-retail population — runs eight to ten preparations across the daily rotation and has been a Lake Street fixture for the better part of fifteen years. The wine list, roughly forty labels, runs the selected Indian-curry pairings (off-dry Riesling, Gewürztraminer, a Côtes-du-Rhône for the heavier curries) and the bar carries a working Indian-beer programme with Kingfisher and Taj Mahal alongside a small classic-cocktail board. Service is warm and quick, the captains work the dining hall with the operational precision that fifteen-plus years in the same location has built, and the back-room private dining suite handles the working corporate-team and family-celebration format that the main floor is not configured for.