Portillo's Restaurants
Chicago-based fast casual restaurant chain
Portillo's Restaurant Group, Inc. is an American fast casual restaurant chain based in the Chicago area that specializes in serving Chicago-style food such as hot dogs, Maxwell Street Polish, and Italian beef. The company was founded by Dick Portillo on April 9, 1963, in Villa Park, Illinois, under the name "The Dog House".
In addition to 46 locations in the Chicago metropolitan area and Northern Illinois, the chain also has six locations each in the Phoenix metropolitan area and the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex; four locations each in central Illinois and the Indianapolis metropolitan area; three locations each in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area, Tampa metropolitan area, and Greater Orlando; two locations each in the Milwaukee metropolitan area, Madison metropolitan area, Metro Detroit, and Southern California; and one location each in Greater San Antonio, South Bend metropolitan area, Metro Atlanta, Fort Wayne, the Quad Cities, El Paso and Tucson
History
Portillo's was founded in 1963 by Dick Portillo. After returning from serving in the Marines, Portillo gathered money from his savings and an investment from his brother Frank to open a hot dog stand. They bought a 12-foot trailer that had no restroom and no running water. They named it "The Dog House". The Dog House operated on North Avenue in Villa Park. At first the stand lost money and a solution was needed.
“Portillo's Restaurants” enters the record as chicago-based fast casual restaurant chain. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Portillo's, Restaurants and Chicago-based can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Portillo's Restaurants” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.