# The Best Burgers in Chicago > The best burgers in Chicago, from tavern classics to chef-driven smash patties, and what makes each one worth the trip. Published: 2025-09-02 · Category: [Restaurants](https://encorechicago.com/restaurants/) · By the Encore Chicago team Chicago will argue about pizza with strangers, but the burger is where the city gets truly serious. From tavern griddles that have not cooled since the Daley era to the diner-style smash patties that took over the 2010s, the best burgers in Chicago form a genuine canon, complete with schools, heresies, and pilgrimage sites. We have eaten our way through all of them, repeatedly, in the name of service journalism. Here is the definitive rundown, plus honest advice on beating the lines. ## What makes a Chicago burger a Chicago burger Every burger city has a style. Ours is the tavern burger: a griddled patty, usually thin, served in a bar that may or may not want you there, often accompanied by an Old Style and very little ceremony. It descends from the same working-class food culture that gave us tavern-cut pizza, and it survived long enough to get rediscovered by the smash burger generation, who realized their grandfathers had been right all along. Layered on top of that foundation are the modern heavyweights: the diner-luxe school, the heavy metal school, the butcher-shop school. They disagree on almost everything except the fundamentals, which in this city are non-negotiable: real griddle crust, cheese fully melted, a bun that knows its role is structural, not decorative. Lettuce is tolerated. Ketchup is a private matter between you and your conscience. ## Au Cheval: the burger that launched a thousand waits Let us deal with the elephant in the diner. Au Cheval's cheeseburger became nationally famous in the mid-2010s and has spent the years since being simultaneously overhyped and underrated, which is a neat trick. The facts: thin griddled patties, molten American cheese, dijonnaise, pickles, a soft toasted bun, all engineered into something that eats like a single unified object rather than a stack of parts. Add the thick-cut bacon if you are feeling ceremonial. It really is that good. It is not transcendent because of a secret; it is transcendent because every element is executed at ten out of ten, every time. The catch is the wait, which on weekends can stretch to hours. Our field-tested strategies: - Go at opening on a weekday, or in the dead zone of mid-afternoon. - Put your name in, then go drink somewhere civilized nearby. They text you. - Solo diners can sometimes slide into a bar seat far faster than groups. ## Small Cheval: the shortcut that counts Small Cheval is the spin-off that answers the obvious question: what if you could get ninety percent of that burger with ten percent of the wait? The menu is minimalist to the point of comedy: burgers, fries, shakes, drinks, done. The patio locations make it one of the easiest great burgers in the city, and we would quietly argue that on a warm evening with a milkshake involved, the experience beats the flagship. Purists will object. Purists are welcome to their line. ## Kuma's Corner: burgers at full volume Kuma's Corner in Avondale fused two things Chicago already loved, heavy metal and ten-ounce burgers, and created an institution. The burgers are named for metal bands, stacked with toppings that should not work and mostly do, and served on pretzel rolls to a soundtrack that will not be turning down. The namesake Kuma Burger, with bacon and a fried egg, remains the gateway drug. Kuma's is the maximalist school, and it demands a certain appetite strategy: skip lunch, bring friends, split something. It is also proof that a burger bar can have a genuine point of view. Plenty of places have copied the loud-room, big-burger format since; nobody has copied the conviction. > A great burger is not an ingredient list. It is a griddle that has been hot since before you were born, and a cook who does not need to look at the clock to know when to flip. ## Billy Goat Tavern: the cheezborger that became folklore Below Michigan Avenue, in the fluorescent half-light of the lower level, the Billy Goat Tavern has been serving its griddled cheezborgers since long before anyone said "smash burger" out loud. This is the burger as folklore: the tavern that inspired the famous "cheezborger, cheezborger" sketch, the newspapermen's clubhouse, the curse-of-the-Cubs origin story. The double is the correct order, the staff will tell you so, and the chips-not-fries rule is part of the liturgy. Is it the best patty in the city on pure culinary terms? No, and that is not the assignment. The Billy Goat is the burger as time machine, and at its price point it may be the best value in the entire Loop. Every Chicagoan owes it at least one lower-level lunch, standing at the counter under decades of yellowed newspaper clippings. ## The tavern-style classics The old griddle taverns are where this whole tradition lives. Top Notch Beefburgers in Beverly has been grinding its own beef and frying its potatoes in beef tallow for generations, and eating there feels like being let in on a neighborhood secret that thousands of people already share. Redhot Ranch, the standing-room dog stand with locations on the Northwest Side, turns out thin, lacy-edged cheeseburgers, made with the same no-nonsense speed as its depression dogs, and hands them over with a pile of fries in the bag. These places share a philosophy: the burger is not an event, it is a right. No reservations, no brioche, no aioli. If you want to understand why Chicagoans get emotional about griddle crust, start here rather than at the famous rooms. The famous rooms are refining this; the taverns invented it. ## Moody's Pub and the beer garden school Some burgers are inseparable from their rooms, and Moody's Pub in Edgewater is the proof. It has been serving its half-pound Moody Blue and pitchers of beer since the fifties, in a dark wooden cave of a dining room lit mostly by fireplace in winter, and in one of the city's great beer gardens once the weather allows. In early September, with the leaves just thinking about turning, the garden at Moody's is one of the most pleasant places in Chicago to eat anything at all. The burger itself is old-school in the best sense: thick, juicy, char-grilled rather than smashed, dressed simply, unbothered by trends. It is cash only, which feels right, and the line on warm evenings moves faster than it looks. Moody's represents a whole quiet category, the neighborhood institution whose burger has fed three generations of the same families, and the city has more of them than any list can hold. When a Chicagoan tells you their best burger is some unheralded pub near their childhood apartment, believe them. They are probably right, for them, and that is how this is supposed to work. ## The chef-driven heavyweights Then there is the school that treats the burger as a technical exercise. The Loyalist, the downstairs sibling of a celebrated West Loop tasting-menu room, serves a burger that regularly shows up on national best-of lists: a blend that famously includes bacon ground into the patty, charred onion, pickles, and a squishy bun that borders on dessert. It is the rare fancy-restaurant burger that beats the dedicated burger joints at their own game. Mott St, the Wicker Park favorite, built a similar cult with its sweet-and-savory stacked burger, a messy, hoisin-inflected thing that spawned imitators all over the city. Ordering a burger in a dining room with a serious wine list feels like a cheat code, and it pairs naturally with making a night of it. If you are building a full evening around food, our roundup of [date night ideas in Chicago](https://encorechicago.com/date-night-ideas-chicago/) includes more than one plan that ends with a chef-driven burger and a bottle of something better than the burger deserves. That imbalance is the fun of it. ## The smash burger wave The late 2010s and early 2020s brought the smash burger wave, and Chicago took to it like the city had been waiting decades for permission. The formula: a small ball of beef pressed hard onto a screaming griddle, maximizing crust, served in twos and threes with American cheese and minimal garnish. Pop-ups became stands, stands became storefronts, and suddenly every neighborhood had a contender slinging crispy-edged doubles. What the wave got right is worth naming. It restored respect for American cheese, the only cheese that melts correctly on a thin patty, and it reminded the city that a burger can be excellent at a price that does not require an occasion. It also rebuilt the connection between burgers and speed: order at a counter, eat within five minutes of the flip, while the crust still crackles. That immediacy is half the flavor, and the old tavern guys knew it all along. We are pro-wave, with one caveat: crust is not a personality. The best smash operations understand seasoning, bun steaming, and onion technique; the mediocre ones understand Instagram. Trust your senses. If the edges are lacy, the cheese is fully melted, and the pickle is doing actual work, you are in good hands. If the burger arrives cold in a branded box after a forty-minute app wait, the algorithm has failed you. ## Burgers as a night out, not just a meal One thing we love about this city: the burger scales to any kind of evening. It can be a ten-minute counter stop, or it can anchor a whole night. Some of the big-shouldered steakhouse-adjacent rooms and old-school dinner spots do a bar burger that quietly outclasses their entrees, a trick borrowed from the Midwest tradition of the roadhouse. That same instinct, dinner as a full evening with drinks and time built in, is why we keep coming back to the region's [Chicago supper clubs](https://encorechicago.com/chicago-supper-clubs/), where the kitchen takes its time and nobody rushes the brandy. The burger also plays well as a first course in a longer crawl. A Small Cheval single leaves room for a second stop, and Chicago rewards the multi-stop appetite. More than once we have followed a burger with a completely different bowl of something, usually noodles; the rundown in our guide to the [best ramen in Chicago](https://encorechicago.com/best-ramen-chicago/) owes several entries to exactly that kind of two-dinner night. We regret nothing. ## How to beat the lines, city-wide A closing clinic, because the difference between a great burger night and a bad one is usually logistics, not cooking. The rules that have never failed us: - Eat early or eat late. The 5:30 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. windows are dramatically calmer than 7 p.m. everywhere in this city. - Weekday burgers taste identical to weekend burgers and cost you half the wait. - Check whether your target takes reservations or runs a virtual waitlist; policies change, so look at their site before you go. - Bar seating is the express lane at almost every chef-driven room. - Rain is your friend. Chicagoans are weather cowards, and a drizzle cuts every line in half. And a final note of civic principle: there is no single best burger in Chicago. There is a best burger for the night you are having. Loud night, Kuma's. Nostalgic night, Billy Goat. Patient night, Au Cheval. Tuesday, Redhot Ranch. The canon is big enough for all of them, and so, with training, are you. ## FAQ: Chicago burgers ### Is the Au Cheval burger worth the wait? The burger itself is worth eating, absolutely; whether it is worth two hours in line is a personal decision. Our advice is to go at off-peak times, put your name in and wait at a nearby bar, or get most of the same experience at Small Cheval with a fraction of the delay. ### What is a tavern-style burger? It is Chicago's homegrown school: a thin patty griddled hard for maximum crust, served simply, usually in a no-frills bar or counter joint. Places like Top Notch Beefburgers and Redhot Ranch carry the tradition, and the modern smash burger wave is essentially this style rediscovered. ### Where should a first-time visitor get a burger in Chicago? Do two: the Billy Goat Tavern's lower-level cheezborger for the history and the folklore, then one modern heavyweight, Au Cheval, The Loyalist, or Kuma's Corner, for the state of the art. Together they tell the whole story of the Chicago burger in two meals.