Cincinnati Style Skyline Chili
Cincinnati chili (or Cincinnati-style chili) is a Mediterranean-spiced meat sauce used as a topping for spaghetti or hot dogs ("coneys"); both dishes were developed by immigrant restaurateurs in the 1920s. In 2013, Smithsonian named it one of the "20 Most Iconic Foods in America". Its name evokes comparison to chili con carne, but the two are dissimilar in consistency, flavor, and serving method; Cincinnati chili more closely resembles Greek pasta sauces and spiced-meat hot dog topping sauces seen in other parts of the United States.
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Ingredients include ground beef, water or stock, tomato paste, spices such as cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, clove, cumin, chili powder, bay leaf, and in some home recipes unsweetened dark chocolate in a soupy consistency. Customary toppings include cheddar cheese, onions, and beans; specific combinations of toppings are known as "ways." The most popular order is a 'three-way', which adds shredded cheese to the chili-topped spaghetti (a 'two-way'), while a 'four-way' or 'five-way' adds onions and/or beans before topping with the cheese. Ways are often served with oyster crackers and a mild hot sauce. Cincinnati chili is almost never served or eaten by the bowl.
While served in many local restaurants, it is most often associated with the over 250 independent and chain "chili parlors" (restaurants specializing in Cincinnati chili) found throughout greater Cincinnati with franchise locations throughout Ohio and in Kentucky, Indiana, Florida, and the Middle East. The dish is the Cincinnati area's best-known regional food.
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Origins and history
Cincinnati chili originated with immigrant restaurateurs who were trying to expand their customer base by moving beyond narrowly ethnic styles of cuisine.โ Tom and John Kiradjieff emigrated from the village of Hrupishta (today's Argos Orestiko), fleeing ethnic rivalries and bigotry in the fallout from the Balkan Wars and World War I, in 1921. They began serving a "stew with traditional Mediterranean spices" as a topping for hot dogs which they called "coneys" in 1922 at their hot dog stand located next to a burlesque theater called the Empress, which they named their business after. Tom Kiradjieff used the sauce to modify a traditional dish, speculated to have been pastitsio, moussakaโ or saltsa kima to come up with a dish he called chili spaghetti.โ He first developed a recipe calling for the spaghetti to be cooked in the chili but changed his method in response to customer requests and began serving the sauce as a topping, eventually adding grated cheese as a topping for both the chili spaghetti and the coneys, also in response to customer requests.
To make ordering more efficient, the brothers created the "way" system of ordering.โ The style has since been copied and modified by many other restaurant proprietors, often Greek and Macedonian immigrants who had worked at Empress restaurants before leaving to open their own chili parlors, often following the business model to the point of locating their restaurants adjacent to theaters.
Empress was the largest chili parlor chain in Cincinnati until 1949, when a former Empress employee and Greek immigrant, Nicholas Lambrinides, started Skyline Chili. In 1965, four brothers named Daoud, immigrants from Jordan, bought a restaurant called Hamburger Heaven from a former Empress employee. They noticed that the Cincinnati chili was outselling the hamburgers on their menu and changed the restaurant's name to Gold Star Chili. As of 2015, Skyline (over 130 locations) and Gold Star (89 locations) were the largest Cincinnati chili parlor chains, while Empress had only two remaining locations, down from over a dozen during the chain's most successful period.
Besides Empress, Skyline, and Gold Star, there are also smaller chains such as Dixie Chili and Deli and numerous independents including the acclaimedโ Camp Washington Chili.
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