Portillo's & Barnelli's Chicago — Attraction in Chicago

Well-the atmosphere is very busy, slightly noisy, with lots and lots of delicious options!!! It feels like a typical Chicago (?New York?) crowd!!! Very noisy!! Busy with lots of customers ordering and picking up, but it did seem organized ….at least to a degree!! We were out and about in downtown Chicago near the Miracle Mile, and had just finished a Gangster Bus Tour. We hadn’t had anything to eat yet, so the timing was great for an early supper/late lunch. There were several options to choose from but when I spotted Portillos I knew that’s where I wanted to eat. We went very traditional, ordering a jumbo Portillo Hotdog with relish (don’t press your luck by ordering ketchup in Chicago!!!!) . We got the big beef Italian beef sandwich, (and it was indeed big. Must’ve been nearly a foot-long and absolutely overflowing with beef, shaved beef that had been swimming in gravy (Au jus). You could get it dry, which meant just the liquid that came out of the pan and they made the sandwich, wet, which meant quite a bit of gravy over the whole sandwich or dipped, which means your sandwich takes a quick swim through the gravy pot. We ordered a small order of fries and a small order of onion rings just because we wanted to try them. You never know when you’re going to hit on some great ones. We also ordered a Chocolate Eclair for dessert. We chose a Coke on ice for our beverage. The ordering process was organized with two or three people designated to take orders and payment on one side of the counter, which stretched out into the dining room . It was Sunday afternoon about 3 PM and the place was jampacked. Despite that, it only took a few minutes to get to the counter and place our order. The staff at those registers were very well schooled and very quick to respond to getting the order placed. The other half of the counter area was for pick up, and then there was a side counter designated for beer and wine sales. More about the food……… Our main dishes were stellar! I know you’re probably thinking-seriously, a hot dog …., right???? But a good hotdog -made out of quality ingredients with the snap of natural casing, can be a beauty to behold for someone like my husband who loves hot dogs. He didn’t care for the poppyseeds on the bun but that was minor. The bun was nice and soft and the Chicago style green relish was indeed green. (Check out the photo) I’ve been dying for years to have an Italian Beef Sandwich. I’ve seen them on more restaurant shows than I could count, but wanted to be sure that I was going to get one that was authentic!! Portillo’s was the place. The sweet peppers were perfect with that sandwich!! I was so tempted to try the hot peppers 🌶️ and I think if I had not been overcome by the atmosphere & delicious odor of the food cooking, I might’ve had the sense to order hot peppers on half and sweet peppers on half and I bet they would’ve done that. I believe the fries and onion rings were the type that are frozen and come delivered in a truck . We would not partake of them, should we make it back here. The Chocolate Eclair was completely unexpected. In my minds eye, I was expecting a Choux pastry shell, filled with pastry cream and topped with chocolate ganache, well-let me tell you- what Portillo’s serves is a very generous slice of about a six thin layers of cake with whipped cream in between the layers and chocolate icing on top. It was delicious!!!!! it reminded me in some respects of a Napoleon in the way it was crafted. Lastly, I want to mention there was a huge volume of seating available to accommodate their customers. In addition to the downstairs dining area, they also offer an upstairs as well. We definitely recommend Portillo’s for the experience and the food and the great...

Amidst the tumult and clamor of a busy fast food restaurant, whose open kitchen makes it even more chaotic, I take a surprisingly large sack back to a table. Inside is my sole item—a large order of onion rings. After years of shrinkflation, I’m surprised by how generous the portion is, with the sizeable carton packed so tightly with onion rings that they overflow onto the table.

My default assumption, earned over seven long years of bitter experience, is that onion rings from chain restaurants are almost invariably frozen, albeit from some proprietary process rather than the same slop that’s shoveled out to a hundred other restaurants.

I don’t believe that to be the case here. The slight irregularities in the breadcrumb coating reassures me that these are likely made in house, though it is cooked to an extremely dark brown. There are no obvious patches or breaks in the ring, with my only real concern being the possibility of being overcooked.

For long-standing chains, it’s never immediately clear how much of the menu is an authentic holdover from the founding, a deceptive attempt to replicate the past to drive nostalgia, or merely an artifact of the same incentives that shaped the original food (namely, speed and thrift).

Whatever the reason, these onion rings are old-fashioned, mostly from the preservation of breading versus batter, which is becoming increasingly rare today. Almost all of the taste is concentrated in the breading, which subsumes the slim onion like a creeping kudzu of yeast and gluten. It’s hot, and salty, but not particularly greasy, and almost entirely bone dry. As I feared, it is certainly overcooked, the onion flavor long departed.

I hesitate to call the thick breading a flaw, because its sheer girth has to be intentional. Most onion rings are crunchy to an extent, but these have a pronounced heft behind them, an almost willful defiance of the very notion of a balanced bite. The breading is probably the densest I’ve ever eaten, and it’s almost a challenge to find the onion part of the onion ring when eating.

As with taste, the texture of the onion is almost completely lost. A handful of onion rings have thicker slices and contain a bit of moisture, but as a whole, this is more like eating a savory onion-flavored pastry shaped like a circle than an onion rings. All of this adds to up to an incredibly dry bite. These are the sort of onion rings that cry, nay, scream for an accompanying sauce, but there’s none to be found.

$5.29 is more than I would usually pay for a fast food side dish, but the sheer quantity of the onion rings goes a long way to making up for the modest bump in price. While they’re not great, they are likely made in-house and delivered hot, fast, and fresh.

It’s entirely possible that this trip is merely nine years past some mythical golden age of Portillo’s, prior to its acquisition and national expansion, and the onion rings are in the midst of a decades-long decline into mediocrity. Alas, what’s in the bag is nothing special, and there are certainly better rings to be...

I randomly picked this place late one night when I was hungry and craving a hotdog. It was around 11 p.m., and the restaurant was pretty busy; I had to wait about 6 minutes in line to place my order. I need to mention right away that the night menu was different from the regular menu; many food options were not available that late. I decided to order 2 Chicago-style hotdogs and fries. With a small iced tea and an additional charge for cheese sauce, my bill was about $17, which I find reasonable. It took maybe just 7 minutes to get my order, which was pretty fast considering many people were waiting for their orders. All my food was very delicious! I liked the sausage in the hotdog a lot, as well as the fresh fries. Another good thing was that I could modify the ingredients in the hotdog and make it the way I wanted. I must mention that at that late hour, the place had a couple of security guards, which was a big plus. A few days later, I came back to this restaurant again during lunchtime. The two lines were extremely busy (I believe I would have had to wait for about 15-20 minutes to order), so I decided to cheat and place an online order to pick up my food. My plan worked perfectly. In about 13 minutes, my food was ready for pick-up, plus the ordering process was very fast and easy. This time, I wanted to try a Polish Sausage hotdog and also a Whitefish Sandwich, which was not available on my last visit. Plus, I couldn’t resist ordering the fries again, which were just as delicious as last time. The Polish Sausage hotdog was super tasty! The sausage had an amazing flavor! It was probably one of the best Polish sausages I have ever tried. The Whitefish Sandwich was also extremely tasty! The fish seemed very fresh, and they did a perfect job cooking it. Finalizing my double experience at the restaurant, I can declare that the food there is very tasty. I have absolutely nothing negative to mention about the food quality. The full menu during the day has a lot of different food options, like salads, pasta, ribs, etc., by the way. The restaurant is designed very nicely; I like its style and vibe a lot. It has two levels to hang out. In general, both times, the place seemed pretty clean. But a big minus I need to mention is that many tables were not clean. Actually, hanging at the restaurant both times for a while, I can’t recall seeing staff checking and cleaning the tables. They definitely need to figure out that issue because some tables got very nasty at some point. I absolutely recommend this place for a visit, especially if you want to try a...