Cincinnati chili is a spiced meat sauce served over spaghetti, first sold by Macedonian immigrant brothers in 1922. Its most famous Texan critic called it too sweet to count. The region's more than 300 chili parlors say otherwise.
The style began at the Empress Chili parlor, which opened on 24 October 1922 beside the Empress Theatre at Ninth and Vine in downtown Cincinnati. WVXU credits the brothers Tom and John Kiradjieff, Macedonian immigrants. Other sources name them differently: The Takeout says John and Ilias, and National Geographic says Joe and Tom. A 1984 report names Joe Kiradjieff as the son, by then running Empress Food Products.
The dish is built differently from a Texas bowl. It is ground beef simmered with tomato, cinnamon, allspice, cloves, chili powder, cumin and oregano, served over spaghetti and stacked by number. A three-way adds cheese, a four-way adds onions or beans, and a five-way adds both. The historian Dann Woellert told The Takeout it was first called chili spaghetti and served mixed like a Bolognese.
The case against comes mostly from Texas. In January 1984, in a report published the day after his death, Frank X. Tolbert was quoted in the Christian Science Monitor saying that Cincinnati chili was too sweet to be chili. The same report quoted a Cincinnati food editor saying Texans become furious at the beans in it. Even friendly writers note the family resemblance to Greek meat sauce: The Takeout traced its spice profile to Greek cooking, and Empress's owner compares it to Bolognese.
The case for is that the name stuck and the city made it its own. Pandolfi concluded the dish should simply be called chili and argued that the mockery often has more to do with its immigrant roots. Gold Star's franchise director disagreed with Tolbert in 1984. Jane and Michael Stern, quoted in 1986, called Cincinnati the chili capital of America. Skyline followed Empress in 1949, and the city marked a full century of the style in 2022.