Best Greek Food in Chicago, Ranked

Start with the neighborhood, because Greektown is older than most people assume. Greek immigrants started showing up in Chicago in the 1840s, mostly as peddlers before anyone had the capital for a storefront, clustering in a stretch of Harrison, Blue Island, and Halsted that everyone just called 'the Delta.' The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 helped, oddly enough — the rebuilding boom pulled in more Greek laborers, and by 1882 something like a thousand of them were living there. That original Delta didn't survive the 1960s: the Eisenhower Expressway and the new University of Illinois at Chicago campus cut straight through it, and the businesses that didn't fold moved a few blocks north to the Halsted Street strip that's still 'Greektown' today. Most of the restaurants you'd actually recognize opened between 1970 and 1990 — meaning Greektown, as currently lit up in blue and white awnings, is younger than the Sears Tower.

Here's the part Chicago genuinely gets credit for, if you squint: a disproportionate amount of what Americans think of as 'Greek food' was standardized, if not outright invented, right there on Halsted Street. Flaming saganaki — the kasseri cheese set on fire tableside, the whole table yelling 'Opa!' — traces to 1968 and a restaurant called the Parthenon, where brothers Bill and Chris Liakouras reportedly lit the cheese after a customer suggested it as a bit of theater. The Parthenon ran for 48 years before closing in 2016, which makes it a genuine piece of Chicago restaurant history rather than a current listing — the same category as the Berghoff's original location or Pizzeria Uno's founding owner: gone from the map, not gone from the story.

The gyro is messier, and more Chicago for it. Ask five different sources who actually brought it to America and you'll get five different names, each with a real company or restaurant attached, and none of them backing down. George Apostolou gets the most votes for serving it first, around 1965, out of the old Parkview Restaurant in Lawndale. Chris Tomaras of Kronos Foods says he's the one who actually brought the gyro over from Greece. Andre Papantoniou of Olympia Food Industries credits a coworker, a line cook named John Garlic, with developing the American version. And then there's Peter Parthenis — a Chicago engineer with no restaurant of his own, who kept getting pulled aside by Greektown owners sick of their imported Greek rotisseries breaking down, so he built a sturdier one out of parts he could actually source in Illinois. By 1973 he was manufacturing them under his own company, Gyros Inc. Depending on who you believe, the Chicago gyro's real origin story is either a sandwich or a piece of kitchen equipment. Nobody's ever fully settled it, and that's sort of the point — this is immigrant food history the way it actually happens, several people pulling toward the same thing at once, not one chef enshrined on a museum plaque.

Not every name in that story closed shop. Greek Islands opened in 1971, started by Konstantinos Koutsogeorgas out of a small basement space at Jackson and Halsted, and the family still runs it today — it's grown enough to open a second location out in Lombard, and it still sets the same kind of cheese on fire the Parthenon made famous a few doors down. A few miles north in Lincoln Park, Alex Polakis opened the Athenian Room in 1972 at 24 years old, starting with three tables and a counter in a neighborhood that was nowhere near as expensive then as it is now. By most recent accounts, Polakis still works there seven days a week — rare company among Chicago restaurant founders who are still physically in the kitchens that made them local legends, instead of just a name on a wall.

The neighborhood itself has thinned out. Most Greek Chicagoans left for the suburbs decades ago, which is exactly why half the list above lives in Niles, Lincolnwood, Morton Grove, Evanston, Palos Heights, Tinley Park, and Richton Park instead of on Halsted Street. The National Hellenic Museum, planted at Halsted and Van Buren, is the part of Greektown that stayed behind specifically to hold onto that history on purpose. The restaurants that stayed, and the ones that followed the community out to the suburbs, are both honoring the same thing the Parthenon and the Delta and the whole mess of gyro claimants were actually doing: cooking a specific, contested, real history instead of a tourist-brochure version of it. That's the kind of layered, slightly argumentative story we mean every time we slap I ❤ Chi on something — it's never as simple as four letters make it look.