Pakistani Food In Wilmette Near Old Orchard

WILMETTE, IL — Hailing from opposite ends of Pakistan, a husband and wife team is offering up "exclusively" Pakistani food made from scratch at a new restaurant in a Wilmette strip mall.

All the food at the new Thali Bites is cooked by Ambreen Bokhari, originally of the southern city of Karachi, who said she makes all the ingredients, including spices, from scratch. While it's been a surprising amount of work, she has found it rewarding to see how popular the restaurant was becoming with the neighborhood.

Her husband Arifeen, from the northern city of Peshawar, said the halal restaurant Thali Bites is the couple's second venture into the food business. They operated a spot in the Gurnee Mall more than a decade ago but had been running a limo business until recently, when UberX made it impossible, he said.

He said people might not realize it, but Pakistani food and Indian food are significantly different.

"Because we eat meat, we know how to cook it," he said.

The new restaurant, named after the word ("Thali") for the large metal plates used for putting a series of different dishes on is situated between a cigar shop and a nail salon on Skokie Boulevard in the former site of the Thai Inbox (now located across the street) and a few blocks north of Old Orchard mall.

The process of finding the proper location lasted more than a year, but now that it has opened the reviews have been overwhelmingly positive. Their plan all along was "to give the most quality of food with good service, no shortcuts, buy the best ingredients," Arifeen said.

Thali Bites is open Monday through Saturday from 11:30 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. and has a lunch special until 3:00 p.m.

Location of Thali Bites, via Google Maps

Menu via Thali Bites

Top photo: Arifeen & Ambreen Bokhari (Courtesy Jonah Meadows)