Al's #1 Italian Beef

The History

In 1938, Al Ferreri opened a small stand at 1079 W Taylor Street in the heart of Chicago's Little Italy neighborhood. It was the tail end of the Great Depression, and Ferreri was solving a practical problem: how to feed a lot of Italian-American wedding guests without spending a fortune on meat. His solution was to slow-roast beef in a blend of Italian spices, slice it paper-thin, and pile it high on crusty Italian bread that was soaked in the natural cooking juices — what Chicagoans call "gravy" or jus. A small amount of beef, stretched across many sandwiches, could feed an entire wedding party. It was an act of immigrant ingenuity, and it created what would become Chicago's signature sandwich.

Taylor Street in the 1930s was the center of Italian-American life in Chicago — a dense, noisy, deeply connected neighborhood where families lived on top of each other and everybody knew everybody's business. The street was lined with Italian bakeries, delis, and social clubs. Ferreri's stand fit right in, serving the working-class families who lived in the surrounding blocks. The Italian beef sandwich was their food — cheap, filling, and soaked in flavor. Word spread through the neighborhood, then through the city, and Al's became the place to go. The original location at 1079 W Taylor Street has now operated continuously for over 85 years, surviving the demolition of much of the old Italian neighborhood for the University of Illinois at Chicago campus in the 1960s.

The menu has barely changed since Ferreri first opened that window. The beef is still slow-roasted and sliced thin. The bread is still Italian, still crusty, still dipped in the hot cooking juices. The giardiniera is still fiery. And the line still stretches out the door on weekends, just as it has for decades. Al's didn't need to reinvent itself because Al Ferreri got it right the first time.

What Made It Famous

Al's is the original Italian beef stand — the place where Chicago's most iconic sandwich was born. While Mr. Beef on Orleans Street got famous from the TV show "The Bear," Al's is the OG, the one that started it all four decades earlier. Every Italian beef stand in Chicago — and there are hundreds of them — traces its lineage back to what Al Ferreri created on Taylor Street in 1938. The technique, the jus, the giardiniera, the crusty bread — all of it started here. When Chicagoans argue about who has the best Italian beef (and they argue about it constantly), Al's is always in the conversation, and it always has the trump card: they invented it.

The Taylor Street location sits in the heart of what was Chicago's densest Italian-American neighborhood, and the sandwich represents the Italian immigrant working-class culture that defined the area. It was food born out of necessity — a way to stretch a dollar, feed a crowd, and still put something delicious on the table. The combination sandwich, which adds a fat Italian sausage link to the pile of sliced beef on a single roll, was also pioneered here. It's an absurd, magnificent creation — two full meals crammed into one dripping, overstuffed sandwich — and it's as Chicago as the L train and lake-effect snow.

Presidents, celebrities, and every food show crew that visits Chicago eventually makes the pilgrimage to Taylor Street. Anthony Bourdain ate here. Guy Fieri ate here. Every Chicago politician running for office has eaten here, because you cannot credibly claim to represent the city without standing at the counter at Al's, sleeves rolled up, jus dripping down your forearms, giardiniera burning your lips, proving that you understand what this city is really about.

Key Facts

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