When did Indian food first come to Chicago? It’s a thorny question. Many restaurants in the city claim to be among the first or the oldest, including Gaylord Fine Indian originally on Clark Street, Indian Garden in Streeterville and Standard India Restaurant originally on Devon Avenue. All three restaurants were founded after 1965, when major immigration reforms expanded the rights of Asians to immigrate to the United States.
This post-1965 wave of immigrants founded the historical South Asian neighborhood on Devon Avenue. But the history of Indian food in Chicago is over 120 years old, if one looks closely. Indian restaurant workers, laborers and students have been in Chicago since earlier in the 1900s.
There is evidence of Indian food being sold in Chicago at various points in the 1920s and 1960s; likely, there are many more stories that have been lost to time. I asked this question about Chicago Indian food history after watching the fascinating new PBS America ReFramed documentary “ ,” directed by Vivek Bald and Alaudin Ullah. The documentary points us toward hidden histories of Indian restaurants run by Bengali Muslim men in Black and Latino neighborhoods.
That group founded some of the first Indian restaurants in the Western Hemisphere, including New York. “If you were to go to New York in 1955, the majority of Indian restaurants that you would find in Manhattan were run by Bengali Muslim men,” said Bald, a historian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technolog.
