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Patty Please
Patty Please launched in May 2024 as a burger pop-up operating out of Small Bar, an established Avondale neighborhood bar run by Footman Hospitality — not a standalone restaurant, but a tight, focused smashburger program working out of someone else's small kitchen. Chef Khaled Simon, who also created the well-regarded Taco Sublime, built the concept around a deliberately narrow menu: real smashburger technique, applied seriously, in a late-night bar setting that doesn't usually get food this dialed in. The house order is "The Pleaser": two smashed patties, American cheese, sliced onion, pickles, and Pleaser sauce, notably served without fries included — a detail that signals this is a burger-first menu, not a full diner spread. The smash technique itself is the draw: two thin patties pressed hard onto the griddle for maximum crisp-edge contact, the same method driving the broader national smashburger wave, executed inside a neighborhood bar's kitchen rather than a dedicated burger restaurant's. Being a bar pop-up rather than its own restaurant shapes the whole experience — it's a late-night, casual, drink-in-hand kind of order, not a sit-down meal, and part of its fast-growing local reputation (enough to draw food-review attention within its first year) comes from that exact "hidden gem inside a bar" quality that makes it feel like a discovery rather than a destination. Chef Simon's earlier work on Taco Sublime matters here too — it signals a chef with real technique moving between concepts rather than a bar owner trying to add a food program as an afterthought, and that seriousness shows up in the smash technique itself: getting a genuinely crisp, lacy edge on a patty pressed inside a small bar kitchen, night after night, at volume, is harder to execute consistently than it looks. That Patty Please has kept its quality up since a 2024 launch, entirely on word of mouth from inside someone else's bar, is a real signal it's not just a novelty pop-up. Patty Please operates inside Small Bar, a longtime Avondale neighborhood bar run by Footman Hospitality, rather than as its own leased storefront — a pop-up-within-a-bar model that's become more common in Chicago as chefs look for lower-overhead ways to launch new concepts. The Pleaser itself runs $8 single, $12 double, priced to function as a genuine bar order rather than a destination-dining check, and it's served alongside sides like garlicky cheese curds and a citrusy frozen daiquiri that keep the whole menu feeling built for drinking, not just eating. Chicago Magazine named Patty Please its "Reboot of the Year" in February 2025, only about eight months after the pop-up's May 2024 launch — a fast turnaround for that kind of recognition, especially for a burger operating out of someone else's kitchen rather than its own standalone restaurant. For a Chicago cheeseburger list, Patty Please is the essential "new but already excellent" entry — genuine smashburger technique inside a small Avondale bar's kitchen, proof that Chicago's burger scene is still actively producing new contenders rather than resting on decades-old institutions.
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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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