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A surprising number of things people eat all over the country started here, in immigrant kitchens, hotel dining rooms, and at the 1893 World’s Fair. Here is our guide to the ones Chicago can fairly call its own, with where each one began, and a note where the story is more tangled than the legend.
The ones that turn up on every "best of Chicago" list, and mostly grew out of immigrant kitchens rather than any single genius.
Thin-sliced beef simmered in its own gravy, piled on a long roll, dunked in the jus and topped with sweet peppers or spicy giardiniera. It came out of the Italian kitchens of the Near West Side, where low-budget "peanut weddings" stretched cheap cuts to feed a crowd. Several stands claim to have invented it, and none can really prove it.
A thin steak breaded and fried, laid on Italian bread and buried under red gravy with sweet peppers or hot giardiniera. It comes from the same Italian-American tradition as the beef, and Ricobene’s in Bridgeport has made the most famous version, a plate-sized one, since the 1970s.
An all-beef frankfurter on a steamed poppy-seed bun, then "dragged through the garden": yellow mustard, chopped onion, bright green relish, a dill spear, tomato wedges, sport peppers and a dusting of celery salt. No ketchup, famously. Vienna Beef traces its sausage to two immigrants who sold franks at the 1893 World’s Fair, but the loaded form came together gradually in the neighborhoods.
A sandwich that swaps the bread for two flattened, fried green plantains, wrapped around garlicky steak, cheese, lettuce and tomato. Juan Figueroa created it at Borinquen Restaurant in Humboldt Park, and it spread from there across the city’s Puerto Rican kitchens and well beyond.
A tall, buttery crust pressed up the sides of a pan and layered cheese-first, with the sauce ladled on top so it does not scorch during the long bake. It was born at the pizzeria that became Pizzeria Uno in 1943. The inventor is murky: the research points to owner Ric Riccardo and cook Alice Mae Redmond, with Ike Sewell, usually given the credit, more likely a backer who joined afterward.
A grilled Polish sausage under a heap of grilled onions, yellow mustard and sport peppers, straight off the old Maxwell Street market. Jim’s Original has served it since 1939.
A deep-fried turnover of pizza filling in a crisp flour shell, invented by the Illinois Tamale Company and still made by the same family. You will basically only ever see it in Chicago.
A corn tamale tucked into a hot dog bun and buried in chili. Nobody can pin down who first did it; it grew out of the city’s old hot-tamale street trade.
Ask Chris. He spends an unreasonable amount of time driving the region for the best beef and the best sandwiches, and he is always happy to point you somewhere good, whether you just moved here or have lived here for years.
Email Chris for a recommendationDishes that came out of Chicago restaurants a century or so ago and never left the city’s menus.
Shrimp baked under a blanket of garlic, sherry and buttered breadcrumbs, created at DeJonghe’s Hotel and Restaurant downtown around the turn of the last century.
Bone-in chicken and wedges of potato roasted hard with garlic, olive oil, oregano, white wine and peas. It is unmistakably a Chicago Italian-American dish, though its exact origin is unknown.
A slab of kefalograviera cheese fried, flamed tableside with brandy and cut with a squeeze of lemon, to a shout of "Opa!". The flaming version is a Greektown creation, most often credited to The Parthenon in 1968, and it is not something you will find in Greece.
Chicago’s Columbian Exposition was a launch pad for treats that are still everywhere.
A dense, fudgy, walnut-topped square glazed with apricot, baked in the Palmer House kitchen for the 1893 fair at Bertha Palmer’s request. Whether it was truly the first brownie anywhere is debated, but this exact one has been made in the same hotel ever since.
Caramel-glazed popcorn and peanuts, from the Rueckheim brothers, popularized at the 1893 fair. The name came a few years later, and the prize in every box later still.
Juicy Fruit and Spearmint both launched in Chicago in 1893, from a young William Wrigley Jr. who had been giving gum away to sell baking powder before he realized the gum was the business.
For most of the 1900s Chicago made more candy than any city in the country, and a lot of the classics started here.
Both came out of the Curtiss Candy Company, founded in Chicago by Otto Schnering: Baby Ruth around 1921, Butterfinger a few years after.
Ferrara Pan, whose candy business began in Chicago’s Little Italy in 1908, invented the Atomic Fireball in 1954 and the Lemonhead in 1962, both by the slow "hot panned" method of building candy up in layers.
The chocolate, caramel and pecan cluster shaped a bit like its namesake, from the company that became Chicago’s DeMet’s.
James Dewar dreamed up the cream-filled sponge cake for Continental Baking in the western suburbs. The original filling was banana cream, switched to vanilla when the war rationed bananas.
Newer classics, and one footnote.
Five stacked slices, chocolate, strawberry, Palmer House (a cherry-walnut vanilla), pistachio and orange sherbet, cut so every bite gets all of them. The Original Rainbow Cone in Beverly turned 100 in 2026.
Eli Schulman’s dense, sour-cream cheesecake became a citywide favorite after it debuted at the very first Taste of Chicago in 1980.
The bag that mixes sweet caramel corn with sharp cheddar corn. Garrett popularized the combination in 1977 and it is pure Chicago, though the actual name "Chicago Mix" is trademarked by a Minnesota company, which is why Garrett calls its own version Garrett Mix.
Two we get asked about: the Frango mint is a Marshall Field’s institution, but it was created at Frederick & Nelson in Seattle and brought to Chicago when Field’s took over the brand in the 1920s. And no, it was not renamed from "Franco" to avoid Francisco Franco; that one is a myth. Twinkies aside, when a thing was only made famous here rather than born here, we left it off the list above.