08/25/2026
Wow - Just Wow!
Alan May's Post
Alan May
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There are a lot of places in Chicago where you can get a hot dog. There are considerably fewer where you can get a hot dog that has been around for 50 years, has been served at the White House, and still operates in a little building that looks pretty much like the kind of place you would have expected to find in Chicago 40 or 50 years ago.
That's Byron's Hot Dogs.
Byron's opened on Irving Park Road in 1975, when a hot dog cost 59 cents. The original location, at 1017 W. Irving Park Road, is still there, and it's about as unpretentious as a Chicago hot dog stand gets. There's the yellow-and-red signage, the little dining room, the outdoor tables, and the parking lot in back. No fancy décor. No artisanal hot dog presentation. You order your food, you get your food, and you eat it.
And there is a little bit more to the Byron's story than just hot dogs.
The man behind the original Byron's was Byron Kouris, a Greek-American restaurateur who had already been in the restaurant business before he got into hot dogs. In the 1960s he operated a chain called the Lunch Pail, and in 1975 he took over a former Steak 'n Egger on Irving Park, remodeled it with Mike Payne, and opened Byron's on his mother's birthday. Payne became the manager and would eventually become the owner.
And here's the part a bunch of you already pointed out to me when I wrote about the Zephyr: Byron Kouris was also the guy behind the Zephyr. He opened the Zephyr in the Pickard Building in 1976, and for the next 30 years it became famous for those enormous ice cream creations that could make a kid's eyes considerably larger than his stomach. So yes, the same guy who thought Chicago needed giant ice cream concoctions also thought Chicago needed a hot dog stand. I think we can safely say Byron Kouris understood his customers.
The Byron's dog isn't exactly shy about its toppings, either. You start with a Vienna Beef frank and then "drag it through the garden" with the usual Chicago lineup, but Byron's adds lettuce, cucumber and green pepper. They call it a "meal on a bun," which is actually a pretty accurate description. It's less a hot dog with some stuff on it than a small salad that happens to have a hot dog hiding underneath it.
And then there's the size issue. You can get a regular dog, a jumbo, or, for those days when apparently a quarter-pound hot dog isn't enough, the Dogzilla, a half-pound dog that is butterfly-cut and grilled. Because apparently Chicago's answer to "How much hot dog is too much hot dog?" has always been, "Let's find out."
Byron's has also accumulated a pretty impressive collection of Chicago food beyond the hot dog: Italian beef, Polish sausage, burgers, gyros, pizza puffs, fries and other neighborhood-stand staples. Over the years, it became the kind of place where regulars knew the people behind the counter and the people behind the counter knew the regulars. That's probably one reason Byron's has survived while so many other old Chicago hot dog stands have disappeared.
But the strangest chapter in the Byron's story came in 2010, when the White House came calling.
Senator Dick Durbin helped arrange for Byron's to serve its hot dogs at the White House Congressional Picnic on the South Lawn. Mike Payne flew to Washington and taught the White House kitchen staff how to prepare the dogs the Byron's way. There is still a photograph of Payne at the White House with President Obama, and the Lawrence Avenue location proudly announces the connection on its exterior.
Think about that for a minute. A little Chicago hot dog stand on Irving Park Road, the kind of place you might drive past without giving it a second thought, ended up serving its dogs at the White House.
And that's one of the things I like about Chicago. We have these places that don't look particularly important. They're not grand buildings. They're not nationally famous restaurants with celebrity chefs. They're little neighborhood places that quietly do what they've always done, year after year, decade after decade.
Byron's is one of those places.
And if you grew up in Chicago, there's a pretty good chance that at some point you stood at that counter, ordered a hot dog, watched somebody bury it under enough toppings to make it difficult to eat, grabbed a pile of those skinny fries and a soda, and thought absolutely nothing of it.
Because it was just Byron's. And that's exactly why it became a Chicago institution.
