Look, we don’t have any beef with Italian beef or Chicago-style hot dogs. But they get all the attention, even though there are plenty of other tasty Chicago-born street foods. Here are a few of the city’s other sandwich-like, handheld specialties that are perfect for counteracting a night of indulging at your neighborhood tavern.
Gyros | Jibarito | Jim Shoe | Maxwell Street Polish | Mother-in-Law | Pizza Puff
Gyros
You might be thinking, “Gyros weren’t born in Chicago!” And to that we’d say, “Kind of! But they were certainly shaped here.” The word gyros comes from the Greek word meaning “to turn,” referring to the seasoned lamb and beef (and sometimes, pork or chicken), that is shaped, roasted on a spit, shaved into thin ribbons. The meat is then heaped atop warm pita bread, often with tomato, onions, and tzatziki – “a cucumber-yogurt sauce that tastes like ranch dressing’s Mediterranean cousin,” as writer David Hammond described in this WTTW Food feature. Though today considered inherently Greek, gyros are descended from the Turkish döner kebab made by the Ottomans, which also used a vertical spit. The Greeks transformed it into pork-centric gyros, and eventually gyros made their way to the United States. Fast-forward to the early 1970s, when a Chicago engineer named Peter Parthenis put a new spin on the dish. He was asked to build a studier vertical rotisserie. He did, and then he realized the money was in the meat – pre-formed meat cones, to be exact. He “began mass-producing gyros cones that could be frozen, shipped, warmed, and then sliced with speed and consistency straight from the rotisserie,” Hammond writes. Gyros have long since been a beloved street food.
Jibarito
A jibarito is a type of sandwich in which fried plantains assume the role of bread. Betwixt said crispy plantains is some kind of meat (originally steak, but chicken, pork, ham, sausage, and other meats have been used), tomatoes, lettuce, cheese, and mayo. As Monica Eng, food expert and co-writer for Chicago Stories: Iconic Foods, writes in Made in Chicago: Stories Behind 30 Great Hometown Bites (co-authored with David Hammond), the term jibaro comes from the Puerto Rican slang term that loosely translates as “hillbilly.” A Puerto Rican-born Chicagoan named Juan C. Figueroa, who has roots in the island’s mountainous region, created the sandwich in his humble Humboldt Park restaurant Borinquen in 1996 as a riff on a plantain sandwich recipe he found in a Puerto Rican newspaper. The sandwich took off, and copycats emerged and appeared in other cities. Today, several Chicago restaurants, including Jibaritos y Más and Jibaritos on Harlem, feature it on their menus.
Jim Shoe
Never heard of this eclectic collection of a sandwich? Let us enlighten you. A Jim Shoe consists of (takes a deep breath) roast beef, corned beef, gyros meat, lettuce, tomatoes, onions, mayo, cheese, giardiniera, and a tzatziki-like sauce, all heaped atop a sub roll. The exact origin of the Jim Shoe – sometimes also seen as “gym shoe” – is quite the mystery. It was likely born somewhere on the South Side, but local food historians can’t definitively find the birthplace of this behemoth.
Maxwell Street Polish
If you’re in search of a tubular treat beyond a Chicago-style hot dog, consider the Maxwell Street Polish. It consists of a Polish sausage – a kind of Chicago kielbasa combining pork and beef – tucked into a bun, topped with sport peppers, onions, and yellow mustard. The storied Near West Side hot dog stand Jim’s Original claims to be its birthplace (though the building has since relocated from its original location on Maxwell and Halsted streets). Around the time of the invention of the Maxwell Street Polish, Maxwell Street was a bustling and diverse immigrant community. A man named Jimmy Stefanovic is said to have popularized the sandwich when he took over the stand from his Uncle Jimmy. However, according to Hammond in Made in Chicago, Express Grill, which sits directly next to Jim’s Original, also claims to have invented the Maxwell Street Polish. “Both Jim’s and the Express Grill were located near one another at the old Maxwell Street Market, and they were started by members of the same family,” Hammond writes of the rivalry.
Mother-in-Law
A convergence of cultures, the Mother-in-Law sandwich goes to truly unexpected places, gastronomically speaking. It is a Chicago corn roll tamale, loaded with chili and some of the same dragged-through-the-garden condiments as a Chicago-style hotdog (tomato slices, onion, bright green relish, a dill pickle spear, mustard, and sport peppers). Once again, the exact origin of this dish is unknown. Fat Johnny’s Red Hots, which is located on the South Side in the Marquette Park neighborhood, is believed to have concocted the Mother-in-Law sandwich, though the former Johnny O’s in Bridgeport also staked a claim. According to Hammond, the tamale came to the United States via Mexican workers who packed them for lunch while working in the fields in the Mississippi Delta. There, they shared their lunch with African Americans, and during the Great Migration, African Americans brought tamales with them to Chicago and other cities. In Chicago, tamales transformed yet again, becoming the “Chicago corn roll tamale,” which consists of meat filling stuffed into tube-like cornmeal dough – now a distinctive, mass-produced snack. And here, it seems, it met up with a hot dog bun, chili, and a whole bunch of condiments to make one messy, delicious bite.
Pizza Puff
The nomenclature of this particular Chicago street snack is pretty straightforward – even if the casing is a bit of a surprise. The pizza puff is a deep-fried tortilla dough stuffed with tomato sauce, cheese, and anything else you might find atop a pizza. It’s sort of like a calzone or a panzerroti. The mighty pizza puff’s story began more than 40 years ago at a company called Iltaco, formerly known as the Illinois Tamale Company. According to Iltaco, the company was founded in 1927 by Elisha Shabaz, an Assyrian immigrant who sold tamales to pushcart vendors. His son, and later, grandson, Warren Shabaz, took over the company. In the 1970s, his clients were looking for something pizza-like. “My brother and I grew up in an all-Italian neighborhood and panzerottis and calzones were huge back then. I had a buddy called Art Velasquez; he owned Azteca corn products. I said, ‘Listen Art, let me take some of your tortillas,’” Warren told Chicago Tonight in 2022. After some trial and error, Warren and his brother Edward used tortilla dough to encase a spicy, pizza filling that wouldn’t split open in the fryer. They began selling their perfected puff in 1976, and the idea took off. Iltaco now sells non-pizza-flavored varieties, too, and they can often be found in the freezer section of Chicago grocery stores.
