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Au Cheval
Au Cheval opened in Chicago's West Loop in 2012 and has spent over a decade as the reigning name in a city with no shortage of burger competition — of every hyped burger in Chicago, it likely has the longest continuous run of rave reviews, and it's regularly cited among the best cheeseburgers in America, not just the city. That's a genuinely rare thing to sustain for more than ten years in a food scene that turns over trends constantly. The restaurant itself is built as a diner-style bar with a real passion for eggs — the broader menu runs to chopped chicken liver, roasted bone marrow, and egg-focused entrées — but the double cheeseburger is what the wait is actually for. It's a thick, griddled patty built with real diner technique rather than smash-style speed, finished simply enough that the beef and cheese do the talking. That wait is a genuine part of the experience and not a small one: Au Cheval doesn't take reservations, seating is limited, and dinner waits upwards of two hours aren't unusual — a level of commitment most burger spots can't ask of customers and get away with. That it still pulls the crowd anyway, more than a decade after opening, is the clearest evidence of how the burger holds up against the hype. Part of what separates Au Cheval from a typical bar-and-grill burger is restraint dressed up as excess — the patty itself is thick and griddled with real technique, but the build stays close to a classic diner cheeseburger rather than piling on novelty toppings the way some "best burger in America" contenders do. The dry-aged, egg-forward menu around it signals a kitchen that could easily overcomplicate the burger and deliberately chose not to, letting the beef, cheese, and griddle char do all the work instead. That discipline is a big part of why it's held its reputation for over a decade in a city that churns through burger trends constantly. Au Cheval was Brendan Sodikoff's second restaurant after Gilt Bar, the craft-cocktail bar he opened in 2010 following a stint as a creative-development officer under Lettuce Entertain You's Richard Melman — training that shaped his approach to building out what's since grown into Hogsalt Hospitality, a group now running dozens of Chicago restaurants and bars. The space itself was remodeled from a former Greektown Gyros storefront to look like a diner that had already been there for decades, hand-painted signage included. Bon Appétit went further than most, naming the Au Cheval burger the single best burger in America outright, cementing a reputation Sodikoff then leveraged into Small Cheval, a faster-casual spinoff built around the same burger for people unwilling to brave the original's wait. For a Chicago cheeseburger list, Au Cheval is the essential "this is the one everyone talks about" entry — a diner-elevated, thick-patty burger from a kitchen that built its reputation on eggs and offal just as much as beef, in a West Loop room that still can't clear its own waitlist a decade in.
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Billy Goat Tavern
Billy Goat Tavern has been a Chicago institution since 1934, when Greek immigrant Billy Sianis opened the original location at 1855 W. Madison, across from the old Chicago Stadium. The tavern moved to its current spot — literally underneath Michigan Avenue at the south end of the Magnificent Mile — in 1964, inside the Apollo Savings and Loan building, where it's stayed a genuine below-street-level landmark ever since. The "cheezborger, cheezborger, cheezborger, no fries, chips" bit is directly lifted from the tavern's own grill counter, immortalized by a Saturday Night Live sketch built around the place's rapid-fire, no-substitutions ordering style. The burger itself is unfussy diner fare — a thin, griddled patty, quickly cooked, no ceremony — which is exactly the point: Billy Goat built its reputation on speed and personality at the counter, not on reinventing the burger. The tavern is equally famous for something that has nothing to do with the burger: the "Curse of the Billy Goat." During the 1945 World Series, Sianis was asked to leave Wrigley Field because his pet goat's smell was bothering other fans, and he responded by cursing the Cubs to never win another pennant — a curse fans and sportswriters referenced for the next seven decades until the Cubs finally broke it in 2016. The tavern's below-street-level setting is a genuine architectural quirk worth knowing before visiting — it sits literally underneath Michigan Avenue, accessible via a set of stairs most tourists walking the Magnificent Mile above would never notice unless they knew to look for them. That physical hiddenness, combined with the tavern's genuine age and the enduring curse mythology, has made Billy Goat feel like a real discovery even though it's one of the most written-about bars in the city — a rare combination of tourist landmark and legitimately old-school Chicago dive that hasn't sanded off its rough edges to court visitors. Sam Sianis, Billy's nephew, took over the tavern after his uncle's death in 1970, and it was Sam's thick Greek-accented delivery of "Cheezborger, cheezborger, cheezborger... no Coke, Pepsi" that Saturday Night Live actually immortalized — the sketch was modeled on his exact cadence at the grill counter, not a generic bit. Sam ran the tavern for more than five decades, expanding the Billy Goat name to additional Chicago locations while keeping the original Michigan Avenue counter's format essentially untouched, and turning it into a genuine hangout for generations of Tribune, Sun-Times, and City News Bureau reporters working nearby, whose bylines and photos still line the tavern's "Wall of Fame." Sam Sianis died in 2026 at 91, having spent more of his life running the tavern than not. For a Chicago cheeseburger list, Billy Goat is the essential "tourist landmark that's also a real Chicago dive" entry — a below-street-level grill counter that's been slinging the same fast, thin, griddled cheezborger since before most of the city's current burger spots existed, wrapped in enough local legend to anchor a city's baseball mythology.
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