Chef Walker Stern had never heard of Cincinnati-style chili. Then the operators of Brooklyn, New York’s HiHi Room asked him to create a spiffed-up version of the Midwestern specialty for their restaurant. He soon learned what a unique and enigmatic dish it is.
“It’s a weird thing,” says Stern, a California native and 20-year veteran of the New York fine- dining scene. “Heavily spiced but not in the traditional smoked chili powder kind of way.”
Indeed, Cincinnati chili, named for the Ohio city where it originated nearly a century ago, is very different from the common chili con carne that is familiar to most Americans.
It is brown and meaty, like the standard Tex-Mex chili variety, but the blend of spices is something else, a genre-bending mix that includes cinnamon, cloves, coriander, cardamom, cumin, anise, allspice, ginger, oregano and thyme. Ohio novelist Robert Olmstead, writing in an essay titled “Cincinnati Five-Way Chili: Still Legal,” describes it as “a chaos of flavor ingredients,” the list of which is “endlessly tapping cultures and climates, ranging by latitudes and longitudes, finding histories and holidays.”
But perhaps the most glaring difference between regular chili and Cincinnati chili isn’t the specific recipe, but how it is commonly served—ladled atop a pile of spaghetti. Locally, this is known as the “two-way,” which can be amplified by piling on cheese (“three-way”), adding onions (“four-way”), and even beans (“five-way”).
Pasta partisans beware: in and around Ohio’s Queen City, it is customary to cut, not twirl, your chili-smothered spaghetti.
How the popular Italian noodle got mixed up with an otherworldly stew like Cincinnati chili is a purely American tale of immigration and assimilation. Two brothers from Macedonia, Tom and John Kiradjieff, are credited with inventing the style back in 1922. The émigrés arrived in Cincinnati by way of New York, home of the popular Coney Island chili dog, a likely influence.
At their downtown Cincy chili parlor, Empress Chili, the Kiradjieffs served up their own brand of spicy meat sauce, a riff on a Greek-style recipe from their homeland, swapping in locally available ingredients like beef instead of lamb and adding domestic seasonings like chili powder and celery salt. They served the sauce over hot dogs as well as spaghetti—a mash-up the duo originally referred to as “chili macaroni,” then a generic term for basically any type of pasta. At the time, spaghetti was one of the few pasta shapes readily available in Middle America.
“They tried to make it as American as possible,” says Ohio food chronicler Dann Woellert, author of The Authentic History of Cincinnati Chili, published in 2013. “That’s why they called it ‘chili,’ not something in Greek.”
In the beginning, Woellert notes, the two-way option was plated Bolognese-style, with chili and spaghetti mixed together. Customer preference later led the brothers to add cheese and adopt the layered, noodles-plus-toppings approach that still persists.
The 5-Way Chili at Camp Washington Chili in Cincinnati.
The hearty dish proved popular and was widely imitated, with several ex-Empress employees setting out to open their own chili parlors. Many would go on to put their own spin on the spice blend, but the spaghetti stayed constant. Today, there are over 200 Cincinnati-style chili parlors spread throughout Ohio and neighboring states, from prolific chains Skyline Chili and Gold Star Chili to single stores like the nationally recognized Camp Washington Chili, open since 1940.
It remains the area’s signature dish and the subject of much speculation about so-called secret ingredients, such as the inclusion of chocolate, which is fiercely disputed. “Every owner of a chili parlor in Cincinnati will laugh when you ask them that question,” says Woellert. “It’s total mythology.”
The part about Ohioans cutting, not twirling, their meat-and-cheese-covered pasta, though, is entirely true, and with good reason, according to Woellert: “You’re guaranteed to have all three layers in one bite.”
A regional cultural phenomenon, the beloved Cincinnati chili defies easy categorization. It is its own thing. Not wholly Greek and hardly Italian, it is neither purely a chili, like the kind that comes in a bowl with a side of crackers, nor purely a pasta dish, either. To some, the spaghetti may seem like an afterthought, just a starchy vehicle for the densely spiced sauce.
On this point, the New York chef Stern found a way to put his own mark on the evolution of Cincinnati chili.
“We made it more like a real spaghetti,” he explains of the version served at the HiHi Room. Stern’s gourmet version starts with handmade pasta, tossed with butter and cheese. The rich chili sauce is made with beef, pork and lamb, and spiced with an array of worldly seasonings in the Cincinnati tradition. Then comes high-grade cheddar, followed by diced white onions. “Four ways,” in other words.
The menu description at HiHi Room reflects this pasta-first approach, though it's now made with dried noodles. It’s called simply “Cincinnati Spaghetti.”
Twirl it, if you wish.
Photo by Riccardo Lettieri