“Chicago has been linked to steakhouses since Swift helped make it the meatpacking capital of the world, and the city retains a reputation as a meat-and-potatoes town even as it has become an internationally recognized hub of innovative gastronomy. The basketball team that Michael Jordan made world-famous is named the Bulls, after all, and they played their inaugural 1966 season at the International Amphitheatre next door to the stockyards where cattle disembarked trains to be turned into beef. Everyday Chicagoans might grab a hot dog or Italian beef for a cheap lunch and scarf some square-cut slices of tavern-style pizza at a party, but when they’re celebrating with a fancy meal, they go to a steakhouse.

“‘We share birthdays. We share good things, bad things, sad things sometimes’ with customers, says Juan Muńoz of working at Gene & Georgetti for more than 40 years. Such a restaurant ‘makes you feel at home,’ says his brother J. J., who has worked there almost 30 years.

“For decades, those who wanted a big hunk of beef in Chicago could eat it ‘where the steak was born.’ (This advertisement slogan neatly recast death into life by turning the slaughtering of a cow into the ‘birth’ of a steak – just one of the ways in which Chicago’s slaughterhouses helped divorce a pristine product from the gruesome realities of meat production.)

“At the Stock Yard Inn at 42nd and Halsted streets, cowboy-hatted ranchers sold livestock to besuited meatpackers near rooms where U.S. presidents had stayed. Diners could sit down and enjoy a steak that had been butchered and dressed at the Union Stockyards that neighbored the inn. Oil paintings of meat barons glowered down from wood paneling in the ballroom of the Saddle and Sirloin Club and bullfighting regalia decorated the Matador Room inside the inn’s half-timbered Tudor-style building. But the Sirloin Room was the most famous of the restaurants, allowing patrons to personally select their own steak before it was branded with a red-hot iron.

“Chicago had restaurants that served steaks before the rise of the stockyards – Billy Boyle’s Chop House was a busy press hangout considered one of Chicago’s best restaurants in the late nineteenth century – but it was the stockyards that cemented an association between Chicago and steak. Businesspeople that flocked to the city for a robust calendar of conventions made a habit of dining at a steakhouse while here – often on the company’s expense account.

“The expansion of railroads, development of refrigeration, institution of ‘de-assembly’ lines in butchering, and fine-tuning of cattle breeds all led to the emergence of Chicago as the center of the American meat industry – and helped make meat plentiful and more affordable. The cattle population of the United States was 15 million in 1870; by 1900 it had more than doubled to 35 million.

“Much of this astonishing growth was due to meatpacking tycoons such as Gustavus Swift; hence the steakhouse Swift & Sons located in an area of the West Loop that once housed meatpacking plants.” (WTTW Chicago)

Read the full story at WTTW Chicago

• The Nostalgia and Luxury of Chicago’s Cherished Steakhouses, Chicago Stories, Iconic Foods, WTTW Chicago, 10/1/25
• Gene & Georgetti, 500 N Franklin St, A Chicago Legacy Business founded in 1941