Image thumbnail

About Us

Traditional, difficult-to-find foods from Central and Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean and beyond.

A taste of home!

That’s what we wanted to offer customers when we built City Fresh Market from the ground up in 2004. We envisioned a place where our parents, who immigrated to Chicago from the former Yugoslavia, could find house-made Cevapi for dinner, Dobos Torta for dessert—and maybe some dried nettle root to prepare an old-world remedy.

Today, City Fresh Market is the place to go in Chicago for the best variety of traditional, difficult-to-find foods from Central and Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean and beyond. Think more than 15,000 specialty food and beverage products on the shelf—also including everyday groceries.

Artisanal before it was trendy, City Fresh is about delivering fresh, homemade flavor—and we proudly do not cut corners on ingredients. Every morning in the store, you’ll find our expert bakers making an enticing array of old-world pastries, cakes and cookies, like Puslica torte, Keks cake and Sampita. Be on the lookout daily to catch Bojan making phyllo dough for our house-made Burek. Over in the dairy department, our team is whipping up bottles of healthy, drinkable homemade yogurt. And in the meat department, our butchers are busy roasting lamb, grilling meat and fish while you wait—and making Pljeskavica. Want to make your own traditional plum marmalade? Our produce department stocks Italian prune plums…and gypsy peppers perfect for stuffing…even fresh-from-the-ground horseradish, calabaza, black radishes and chayote.

No, we’re definitely not your average Chicago store. However, we’re still a full-service market. Daily items that you need, crisp produce, a deli, and a specialty wine and spirits section are all part of the City Fresh experience. Not finding what you need? We’ll source it, track it down and special order it for you, all at a great value.

We’re a family-run business, and we proudly run this business for our extended family: our customers. Most of our staff is multilingual, and on a first-name basis with our shoppers. That’s why City Fresh is a regular stop for so many locals: we work to make our market a personal experience that’s as extraordinary as our richly diverse community in the Windy City.

Enjoy!
Danny and Ray Kovacevic