Food & Drink

Chicago Food & Drink Guide

Chicago's table organized by dish, not by neighborhood: deep dish and its tavern-style rival, the all-beef Chicago dog, Italian beef, the jibarito, and the bitter local liqueur locals love pushing on visitors.

By the Extra Chicago editorial team·Updated Oct 20262 min read·2 sections

Photo: Mariah Hewines / Unsplash

The short version

✓Deep-dish pizza is widely credited to Pizzeria Uno's 1943 debut — the dish most visitors expect, and the one locals argue about hardest.
✓Tavern-style thin-crust, cut into squares rather than wedges, is the pizza Chicagoans actually eat most — arguably a bigger part of the city's identity than deep dish.
✓The Chicago-style hot dog is all-beef on a poppy-seed bun, dragged through the garden — and asking for ketchup is a genuine local faux pas.
✓Italian beef (thin-sliced, jus-soaked, on an Italian roll) and the jibarito — a fried-plantain sandwich born in Humboldt Park's Puerto Rican community — round out the city's defining sandwiches.
✓Malört, the notoriously bitter local liqueur, is a rite of passage locals love handing to out-of-towners; approach it with curiosity and low expectations.

Pizza, and the argument that comes with it

Deep dish is the pizza visitors come expecting — a thick, buttery crust holding cheese and chunky tomato sauce in reverse order from a standard pie, widely credited to Pizzeria Uno's 1943 debut. It's a meal more than a snack, worth the wait it usually demands, and worth going in knowing it's not what most Chicagoans reach for on a Tuesday night.

That honor goes to tavern-style thin-crust, cut into small squares rather than wedges — cracker-crisp, easy to share, and arguably a bigger part of the city's everyday food identity than its more famous cousin. This guide is organized by dish rather than by neighborhood or "best of" ranking, because that's the more useful way to actually decide what to eat where — deep dish and tavern-style are different meals for different moods, not competitors for the same slot.

Things to Do in Chicago

Pair a meal with a museum day or an evening at the ballpark.

lighted roadway surrounded with buildings

Chicago Neighborhoods Guide

Pilsen, Chinatown and Devon Avenue each carry distinct immigrant-community food scenes.

The sandwiches, the dog, and a bitter local rite of passage

The Chicago-style hot dog is a whole philosophy in a bun: an all-beef frank, poppy-seed bun, and a specific pile of toppings — mustard, onion, relish, tomato, a pickle spear, sport peppers, celery salt — dragged through the garden, never ketchup. Italian beef runs alongside it as the city's other defining sandwich: thin-sliced beef soaked in jus, ordered wet, dipped or dry, with the sweet-versus-hot pepper choice as its own small ritual.

Less famous outside the city but no less real is the jibarito, a sandwich that swaps bread for two flattened, fried plantains, invented in the Puerto Rican community around Humboldt Park. And when the meal's done, there's Malört — a wormwood liqueur so aggressively bitter that ordering it for a first-time visitor is practically a local sport. Try it once, understand the joke, and don't feel obligated to order a second.