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Here are the ten oldest restaurants in the city and the ten oldest in the suburbs, every one of them still taking orders, with the stories of how they lasted. A place that has fed the same corner for a hundred years also tells you something about the block it sits on.
Every place below was open and serving when we checked in September 2026, and each is ranked by the year meals started being served under a line that continues today. Buildings are often older than the restaurants inside them, families change, and a few spots moved down the block along the way; we say so wherever it happened. Where two histories argue with each other, we let them argue on the page.
From an 1892 diner counter in Woodlawn to a 1930 tap in Little Italy. Between them they cover the Fair era, Prohibition, and every version of Chicago since.
The city’s oldest, and no relation to the mayors. John Daley opened it to feed the construction crews of a booming South Side; two Greek partners took it over in 1918 and their family has run it ever since. In 2019 it moved into a new building across the street at 63rd and Cottage Grove in Woodlawn, and kept right on serving.
Herman Berghoff’s German beer hall on Adams Street in the Loop grew into the city’s most famous old dining room, and when Prohibition ended it walked away with Chicago liquor license No. 1. The family briefly closed it in 2006, then a Berghoff daughter reopened it, and a Berghoff runs it still.
The first restaurant ever opened inside an American department store, on the seventh floor of Marshall Field’s, now Macy’s on State Street. It began with a clerk named Mrs. Hering feeding shoppers her chicken pot pie, and that pie is still on the menu. At the holidays the dining room wraps around a great tree and the wait stretches for hours.
Luigi Davino’s Taylor Street bakery grew into the restaurant that fed Little Italy for four generations of the same family. It moved and expanded twice without ever leaving the neighborhood, which is its own kind of loyalty.
The building went up in 1872, a wood-frame thrown together just after the Fire and just before the city banned wood downtown, and it has settled into a visible lean. The restaurant arrived in 1921, and during Prohibition the painted green door told River North where the drinks were. The basement speakeasy still pours under the name The Drifter.
A cash-only cafeteria in Hyde Park whose motto, See Your Food, is painted right on the sign. It has moved within the neighborhood over the decades and outlasted every dining fashion. A menu board lists President Obama’s favorite orders from his years living nearby.
Opened by William Mitchell and named for his son, it sits on Jackson Boulevard at the traditional first mile of Route 66, which made it the first stop on the Mother Road for generations of travelers. It is on the National Register of Historic Places, the line still forms before sunrise near the West Loop, and the staff still hands out donut holes while you wait.
Duke Linderman opened a 22-seat chili parlor on Archer near McKinley Park, and a century later the chili is still made to his recipe. Ownership has changed hands only twice in a hundred years, which may be the quietest achievement on this list.
Three Italian restaurants stacked in one Monroe Street building, run by the third generation of the Capitanini family, with a cellar of over a thousand wines beneath the Loop. Chicken alfredo is said to have been born upstairs, and the twinkling village room has hosted a hundred years of proposals and anniversaries.
The DiBuono family’s corner tap on Vernon Park Place has served Little Italy family recipes since 1930, and in 2008 the James Beard Foundation named it one of America’s Classics. It still feels like eating in somebody’s dining room, because for one family it basically is.
Until 2017 the answer to “oldest restaurant in Chicago” was Schaller’s Pump, pouring in Bridgeport across from the 11th Ward office since 1881. It closed after 136 years when its owner passed, and Daley’s inherited the title. And one sweet asterisk: Margie’s Candies has been serving sundaes in its booths since 1921, so if an ice cream parlor counts as a restaurant, it belongs in the city’s top ten too.
The suburbs go deeper into the past than the city does, because the Fire never reached them. Two of these were pouring before the Civil War.
Benjamin Fuller put the building up in 1843 in what was then the village of Fullersburg, and the county licensed it as a grocery and tavern in 1846. It is believed to be the oldest continuously operating privately owned eating and drinking spot in DuPage County, carefully restored in 2006 and still packed on a Friday.
Opened as the Zimmer Tavern and Wagon Shop, where travelers ate while their horses were shod, and it calls itself the oldest restaurant in Illinois. Everything inside still carries a price tag, because everything really is for sale, a tradition as old as the room. The 35-foot mahogany bar was salvaged from the McCormick Place fire, one server has worked the floor for nearly fifty years, and after 62 years the Ullrich family passed it to new owners in 2023.
Emil Kobal opened the ground floor as a tavern and grocery in 1922 and raised his family upstairs. The famous burger arrived with a 1974 renovation, and the resident ghost story arrived somewhere along the way; the staff will tell it if you ask.
Jack Peabody, of the Peabody coal fortune, kept weekend guests at his horse farm and had nowhere to feed them, so he opened a restaurant on Route 66. Duncan Hines praised it, the Hastert family has run it since 1954, and their pressure-fried chicken recipe from the 1950s now feeds dining rooms that seat over a thousand. It hibernates each winter and reopens every February.
Barbecue on Thatcher Avenue since 1930, made, as the family puts it, the same way they did the first year. The dining room has been the after-game and after-everything room for the near west suburbs for generations.
Ice cream made on Green Bay Road since 1935, in a parlor that also grills a respectable burger. Locals like to tell an Al Capone story about the place; historians have shown it does not hold up, and the ice cream has never needed the help.
The original Plush Horse has scooped in Palos Park since 1937, and on a summer night the line outside is a southwest-suburban ritual. Generations of first dates have ended here on purpose.
Jim and Kitz Masterson bought a white house from their aunt Bebe Hackney for one dollar and named the restaurant for her. The Hackneyburger and the french-fried onions became North Shore legend. Its sibling on Lake Avenue closes in September 2026 after 71 years, which leaves the Harms Road original as the last Hackney’s standing.
It began as a gas-station lunch counter in the late 1930s, where two local farm women taught the owner their fried chicken recipe, and the current roadhouse opened on Route 66 in 1946. Bypassed by the interstate, rescued by Dell and Grace Rhea in 1963, inducted into the Route 66 Hall of Fame, and on the National Register of Historic Places since 2006.
Gene Mormino’s original stand opened at Polk and Western in 1946 and was famously lost in a card game in 1949, so he rebuilt on River Road in 1950 with partner Jude DeSantis. The depression dog comes with mustard, onions, relish and sport peppers under a fistful of fresh-cut fries, and there is no ketchup on the premises. National best-hot-dog titles followed.
The Village Tavern calls itself the oldest restaurant in Illinois, from 1847. York Tavern’s building is four years older and its county license one year older, but its claim is worded as DuPage County’s oldest, and its early decades mixed grocery with tavern. Both rooms have poured through every decade since before the Civil War, so we list them in building order and let the two of them keep arguing across the county line.
The classics that come up next in each column, every one still open.
Orange Garden (1932), the city’s oldest Chinese dining room, whose famous neon sign went to a collector in 2022 while the room cooked on. Twin Anchors in Old Town (1932), Sinatra’s rib joint. Billy Goat Tavern (1934) of curse and cheezborger fame. Miller’s Pub (1935). Gene & Georgetti (1941), the city’s oldest steakhouse. Manny’s cafeteria (1942). Pizzeria Uno (1943), where deep dish was born. Home Run Inn in Little Village, a tavern since 1923 whose pizza arrived in 1947. And Superdawg (1948), the last true drive-in in the city.
The Deerpath Inn in Lake Forest (1929), an English manor of a hotel whose dining room never closed. And the Choo Choo in Des Plaines (1951), where a model train still delivers the burgers; it went dark once, and the town brought it back. The suburbs also lost some greats along the way, which makes the ten above rarer than they look.
Every restaurant on this page survived because its neighborhood kept showing up, and that kind of staying power is worth knowing about when you are picking a block to live on. Chris will happily talk you through any of these neighborhoods and towns, and where to eat once you get there.
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