Chicago Mike's Beef & Dogs — Restaurant in Centennial

Born in Chicago, I really want to love Chicago Mike’s Beef and Dogs. Having so far tried their Italian Beef sandwiches, hot dogs and pizza, I’m left with an underwhelming but emphatic meh.

Their Italian Beef is the best thing on the menu, hands down. But it’s a pale shadow to what you can get in Chicago. Order it wet, covered in peppers, and with extra juice on the side and it’s decent. But expensive.

Their Vienna beef hot dogs have little flavor to them and are usually tough as if they’ve been cooking for a really long time, similar in consistency to what you get form the corner convenience store when you’re really, really desperate. Their chili-cheese version has a neon-glowing splatter of cheese-like something on top of a super-bland chili. Honestly, sadly, I’ve gotten better chili-cheese dogs at Der Wienerschnitzel.

And their pizza - look - just go nextdoor to Jerome’s if you want a truly decent slice, okay?

Everything is wildly over priced for what you get. It’s $3 to add a drink and chips/tots to any entree. So that puts you at $9 for a 4” Italian beef sandwich, $11 for the 6” and $13 for the 8”, rounding up for convenience. Italian sausage combo will run you $10. Straight up Chicago dog combo would be around $7, chili cheese $8. It’s not as bad as Five Guys Burgers, but it’s close - and Five Guys has far better food for the cost.

The interior is all about Chicago, including posters, pictures and a map of Chicago with a bunch of pins in it. Someone told me that map is for customers to pin where in Chicago they’re from. Which is kinda cool.

The staff are incredibly friendly, so they have that going for them.

But overall, it's not a place I will frequent much - maybe a once every couple of months kinda thing if I'm jonesing for an Italian...

Horrible customer service. Was picking up a phone order for my mom, she comes here frequently for lunch and usually it’s great quality food and service. Today was the opposite. Upon arriving, I let the nice lady at the register (the only seemingly nice one in the store) that I was picking up an order, she asked if it was a pizza. Knowing my mom, she has never ordered a pizza from here, she gets the same thing every time. So I double checked and let them know that it was not a pizza, it was a beef sandwich with gardenia peppers. The whole kitchen staff stared at me like I was crazy and then tried to tell me that my mom must have ordered wrong. I again let him know of her order, a beef sandwich with gardenia peppers and that she gets the same thing every time. The guy then tells me that she ordered wrong. I told him the conversation on the phone that my mother had with the guy who rang in her order. Once again, he tries to make it seem like it’s our fault. The whole kitchen at this point is giving dirty looks, staring. They fix it and bring the order out and tell me that the guy on the phone probably misheard. I drop the food off only to get a call from my mom saying that her sandwich is wrong, there’s no gardenia peppers but the sandwich is covered in an excessive amount of hot peppers all over the top. We will not...

We LOVE Chicago Mike's pizza!!! We used 2 live 1 mile away from their old location (about 5 yrs ago) & we'd order from them at least once a month or so. Now, I'm a native Chicagoan & I'm pretty picky about my pizza (sorry 4 the alliteration). When I was growing up, there was this phenomenal pizza place (oops! I did it again! LOL!) that we loved so much, we'd get 'Za from there practically every Friday night... Now THAT'S a LOT of ZA! ;o)

Anywho, the first time I tried Chicago Mike's Za, I was transported back in time to our family's favorite pizza place... I was blown away & SO thrilled to finally have a great place to get some of my favorite tasting Za that always brought back some great family memories.

Unfortunately, we moved away from our favorite, Chicago Mike's, 5+ yrs ago. But today we happened to be in the area for another appointment & decided we couldn't go any longer w/out getting some of our favorite Za from Mike's. And we're SO VERY glad we did! YUMMMMMYYYY!!

I guess we'll just have to make the trip every so often because we love their phenomenal Za that much! You can trust this Chicago girl's taste in Za!

PS - Mike's also serves up some other great Chicago food favorites like REAL Chicago style hot dogs & Italian...