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Redhot Ranch
Redhot Ranch was founded by Barry Nemerow and Jeff Greenfield — the same duo behind The Wieners Circle — starting with a single hot dog stand in 2005 near White Sox Park on the South Side, built around reviving the classic Chicago-style "Depression Dog": mustard, relish, onion, sport peppers, and fresh-cut fries, no ketchup in sight. The burger came later and almost as an afterthought, which makes its current popularity a bit of a reversal of the original plan. In 2014, the team opened two more locations and added a double cheeseburger modeled directly on In-N-Out's format — a style that barely existed in Chicago's home-grown fast-food scene at the time. The charburger caught on fast enough that it quickly outpaced the hot dogs that built the brand in the first place, developing its own cult following across Chicagoland independent of Redhot Ranch's original identity as a hot dog stand. That hot dog pedigree still matters for context: Redhot Ranch was inducted into the Hot Dog Hall of Fame as its 151st member, recognition for the original Depression Dog rather than the burger — a reminder that this is fundamentally a Chicago hot dog stand that happens to also make an excellent smash-style cheeseburger, not a burger restaurant that added dogs as an afterthought. Nemerow and Greenfield's earlier work at The Wieners Circle is worth knowing for anyone expecting a quiet counter-service experience — both businesses share a certain unapologetic, no-frills Chicago attitude, prioritizing the food over polish or hospitality theater. That same directness carries over to the burger: no elaborate build, no house sauce mythology, just a well-executed double-patty smashburger sold at a genuine value price point across three no-nonsense counter locations. Nemerow and Greenfield's first Redhot Ranch (originally called 35th Street Redhots) opened in the summer of 2005 near the old Comiskey Park/White Sox Park area on the South Side, well before the burger existed at all. The RHR charburger itself has a specific origin story: the pair got the idea in 2013 while eating at an In-N-Out in Las Vegas, and came home to build their own version — fresh patties, melted cheese, mustard, ketchup, sport peppers, lettuce, tomato, onion, and a house special sauce — onto a menu that had spent its first eight years focused entirely on hot dogs. In April 2024, the city of Chicago gave Redhot Ranch an honorary day alongside its formal induction into the Hot Dog Hall of Fame, civic recognition unusual for a business that, by that point, had arguably become just as well known for its burger as for the hot dog stand that built its name. For a Chicago cheeseburger list, Redhot Ranch is the essential "West Coast smashburger format done by South Side hot dog guys" entry — an In-N-Out-style double cheeseburger built by two people whose actual expertise and reputation was forged making Chicago dogs, now sold at three counter-service locations across the city.
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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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