Chicago

Chicago's food economy was built on meat. The Union Stock Yards, assembled by a consortium of railroad companies, operated in the South Side's New City area from 1865 until 1971 and made the city, in Carl Sandburg's phrase, "hog butcher for the world" — a lineage the Culinary Historians of Chicago trace forward into the local steakhouse trade.

The city's vernacular dishes carry contested authorship. Deep-dish pizza is generally credited to Pizzeria Uno, founded in 1943 by Ike Sewell and Richard Riccardo, though pizza historian Peter Regas has disputed the invention account; the restaurant's cook Alice Mae Redmond reworked the dough with water and olive oil before moving to Gino's East, founded 1966. The Italian beef — thinly sliced roast beef in its own gravy on French bread, ordered hot with giardiniera or sweet with peppers — has multiple claimants. With deep dish and the Chicago hot dog, writer Michael Gebert calls it the triumvirate of Chicago original foods.

Restaurant history runs a separate arc: early French rooms, then Italian American and Mexican American dining rooms; the fine-dining line of Charlie Trotter's, Trio and Tru; and multi-restaurant groups including Lettuce Entertain You, One Off Hospitality and Boka. Grant Achatz, a Trotter alumnus, opened Alinea in 2005, the first Chicago restaurant to hold three Michelin stars.