Cincinnati, OH: The Chili City That Actually Has Two Things Worth Eating

Cincinnati's most famous food is spaghetti with cinnamon meat sauce buried under a pound of shredded cheddar. Its second most famous food is a breakfast meat nobody outside Ohio has ever heard of. Both of these things are genuinely great. The city has been trying to explain this to the rest of the country for about a hundred years and mostly failing.

This issue is two stops.

Cincinnati chili is not Texas chili. It is not trying to be Texas chili. It was invented in 1922 by two Macedonian immigrants who took a lamb stew their family had been making for generations, swapped in beef, added cinnamon and cloves and sweet paprika, called it "chili" because Americans expected chili, and served it over spaghetti to burlesque theater patrons. 1

Today there are over 250 chili parlors in the Cincinnati metro area. 1 People from other states visit one, order it expecting Texas chili, get confused, and write blog posts about how weird Ohio is. This has been happening for decades and does not appear to be stopping.

Camp Washington is where to go. It has been in the Camp Washington neighborhood since 1940, it is open 24 hours six days a week, and in 2000 it won a James Beard Award in the America's Classics category — making it the only chili parlor in history to win a James Beard Award, which is either a triumph or a sign that the Beard committee had a very good day. 2 The Smithsonian Magazine named it one of the 20 most iconic food destinations in America. 2

The chili here has a coarser grind than most parlors, a beefier base, cinnamon loud on the front end with oregano underneath. Johnny Johnson ran the place for decades starting in 1951; his daughter Maria Papakirk runs it now. 1

Order: A three-way, inverted — chili on top of the cheese so the fat runs down through everything. Add a coney (hot dog, chili, mustard, raw onion) on the side. Accept that you are going to want another.

Goetta is a breakfast meat made from ground pork, steel-cut oats, and spices, formed into a loaf and sliced into rounds and fried until the outside is crisp and the inside stays soft. It is a 19th-century German immigrant food from Cincinnati's Over-the-Rhine neighborhood, invented because oats are cheap and pork alone gets expensive. Same economic logic as haggis or scrapple, except it is significantly better than both of those things. 3

When you describe it to someone who hasn't had it, they will say "so it's a sausage... with oatmeal in it?" Yes. That is what it is. Order it anyway.

Eckerlin Meats has been at Findlay Market — Ohio's oldest continuously operating public market, open since 1855 — since 1852. 4 5 The house-made goetta here has more oat presence than the factory stuff (Glier's is fine, but it's fine the way a gas-station sandwich is fine), which means more texture, a harder crust when fried, and the sensation that someone made a choice while making it. 6

Order: The goetta, egg, and cheese on a bun at the counter. It costs a reasonable amount of money and you will think about it later.

Market hours: Wednesday through Sunday.

Cincinnati spent most of its history cooking two things with total conviction and letting everyone else think that was a problem. Camp Washington has a James Beard Award. Eckerlin has been making goetta since before the Civil War.

You can argue about the food culture, or you can eat. The counter at Camp Washington is open at 2 a.m. if you need more time to decide.