Chicago has plenty of foods everybody knows. Deep-dish pizza. Italian beef. Chicago dogs.
But once you start talking to people who actually grew up here, the list gets a lot more interesting.
You hear about the things people grabbed after work, the food they ate because it was cheap and nearby, or the weird-looking combination they ordered so often they stopped thinking twice about it.
Some of those foods disappeared when the neighborhood places making them disappeared.
A few somehow hung on.
Here are seven old-school Chicago foods that are still around. Some are famous. Some really aren’t. But all of them tell you something about the city that you won’t get from a deep-dish menu.
1. The Mother-in-Law
Chicago has never been afraid of putting two things together that probably shouldn’t be together.
The Mother-in-Law is a pretty good example.
You take a Chicago-style tamale—the soft cornmeal kind—and put it in a poppy-seed hot dog bun. Then you cover the whole thing with chili.
That’s the sandwich.
Or whatever we’re calling it.
Fat Johnnie’s Famous Red Hots on South Western Avenue is one of the places most associated with it, although the exact origin story is still a little fuzzy. There are different versions of how it got started and where the name came from.
Honestly, I kind of like that nobody can give you one perfectly clean answer.
The important part is that the thing survived.
If you’ve never had one, it looks strange. There’s no getting around that.
Then you eat it, and suddenly the combination doesn’t seem quite so strange anymore.
2. The Gym Shoe
The first thing you should know about the Gym Shoe is that nobody invented it because they were worried about portion control.
Corned beef. Roast beef. Gyro meat.
All of it goes into one sandwich.
Then you’ve got lettuce, tomato, tzatziki, mayo, mustard and giardiniera joining the party.
It’s enormous. It’s messy. It probably isn’t what your doctor had in mind.
But this is exactly the kind of sandwich that came out of Chicago’s neighborhood shops. You weren’t buying it to take a picture for Instagram. You were hungry, you had a few dollars, and you wanted something that would actually fill you up.
And there’s something very Chicago about all those influences sitting together: Jewish deli meat, Greek gyro, Italian-style giardiniera, all stuffed into the same roll.
It sounds like too much.
That’s sort of the point.
3. Shrimp DeJonghe
Shrimp DeJonghe sounds like something you’d order at a fancy restaurant in the 1920s.
The actual dish is much simpler.
Shrimp, garlic, butter, breadcrumbs and sherry, baked until the top gets brown and crispy.
That’s basically it.
The dish has a long Chicago history and is generally associated with the DeJonghe brothers, who popularized it around the time of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition.
The original DeJonghe hotel and restaurant are gone now.
The shrimp survived.
That’s one of the things I like about old Chicago food. Restaurants disappear. Owners retire. Buildings change hands. Somehow a dish can keep turning up on menus decades later.
Gene & Georgetti and The Berghoff are among the old-school Chicago restaurants that have served it.
If you’ve never ordered it, this is your reminder.
4. Rib Tips and Links
Chicago barbecue doesn’t always get the credit it deserves, partly because it doesn’t look exactly like the barbecue people outside the city expect.
Rib tips and hot links are a big part of the Chicago version.
The meat goes into those distinctive Chicago-style smokers, then comes out smoky and tender, usually with fries, white bread and sauce.
And the sauce will get everywhere.
Your fingers. The tray. Somehow your shirt.
You might as well accept that before you start.
Lem’s Bar-B-Q has been serving Chicago barbecue for decades, and places like it are a big reason the style has lasted.
There’s no need to make it fancy.
Get the food. Sit down. Eat with your hands.
If you’ve got a favorite rib-tip place, there’s a pretty good chance you’re convinced everyone else is wrong about theirs.
That’s part of the tradition too.
5. The Pizza Puff
The pizza puff might be the most Chicago food on this list simply because it makes absolutely no attempt to be anything other than itself.
It’s pizza filling inside a sealed pocket.
Then you fry it.
That’s it.
Iltaco Foods helped turn the frozen pizza puff into a Chicago staple in the 1970s, and they became a familiar sight at hot dog stands and neighborhood restaurants all over the city.
It’s not a Neapolitan pizza.
It’s not a calzone.
It’s a fried pizza pocket you order when you’re hungry.
The only real problem is that the first bite can be approximately the temperature of the sun.
You know this.
You still bite into it too early.
Then you spend the next few minutes pretending you haven’t burned the roof of your mouth.
And you finish the thing anyway.
6. The Sweet Steak Sandwich
This one is harder to explain to somebody who didn’t grow up around Chicago’s South and West Sides.
Thin-sliced steak. Grilled onions. Cheese.
And a sweet, barbecue-style sauce.
The exact version changes depending on where you get it, which is probably why asking somebody where to find the best one can turn into a much longer conversation than you expected.
Everybody has a place.
Everybody’s place is better.
And somebody will eventually tell you that you haven’t had a proper one unless you’ve tried theirs.
That’s how you know you’re dealing with a neighborhood food rather than something invented for tourists.
7. Italian Beef — The Old-School Way
Yes, Italian beef is famous.
But there is a difference between knowing what an Italian beef is and understanding why Chicagoans can spend ten minutes arguing about how one should be ordered.
The basics are simple enough: thin-sliced beef, an Italian roll, sweet peppers or hot giardiniera, and plenty of gravy.
Then things get complicated.
Dipped?
Wet?
Dry?
Sweet peppers?
Hot?
Both?
People have opinions.
The bread is supposed to get soaked. Your hands are probably going to get messy. If you finish the sandwich without needing a napkin, you may have done something wrong.
And while Italian beef has become a Chicago food famous far beyond the city, the old neighborhood version is still worth seeking out.
It’s lunch, sure.
It’s also apparently a personality test.
Why These Foods Matter
None of these foods started out trying to become famous.
They were neighborhood foods.
People ate them because the shop was close to home. Because they knew the owner. Because their parents went there. Because it was what you ordered after a shift or on the way home.
Then years passed.
Some of the places closed.
Others kept going.
That’s really how food traditions survive. Not because somebody declares them historically important, but because enough people keep coming back.
Chicago has lost plenty of restaurants and bakeries that people once assumed would be around forever. So when one of these old-school foods is still being made, it’s worth paying attention.
Maybe order the thing you haven’t tried.
Maybe ask the person behind the counter what they recommend.
And if you find something you love, go back.
Because someday somebody is going to ask what Chicago used to taste like.
It would be nice if we still had an answer.
What’s the Chicago food I left off the list? And what’s the old-school place you think somebody should visit at least once?
