Food History of Cleveland

Key eras

1. 1880-1920: Eastern European immigration shapes the table

   Cleveland's population quadrupled between 1880 and 1920 as Polish, Slovak, Hungarian, Czech, Slovenian and Italian families poured into Slavic Village, Tremont and Little Italy to work the steel mills. They brought kielbasa, pierogi, paprikash, cassata and the church-basement fish fries that still anchor Lent across the city.

   Taste it todayKielbasaPierogi

2. 1912: West Side Market opens

   Mayor Newton D. Baker dedicated the West Side Market on October 31, 1912 after fourteen years of planning, and trading began on November 2, 1912 with 109 indoor stands at Lorain and West 25th. The yellow-brick Hubbel and Benes hall is the last of Cleveland's historic public markets still operating on its original 1912 site.

   Taste it todayWest Side Market

3. 1925-1971: Stadium Mustard and the ballpark condiment empire

   Joe Bertman started selling spicy brown mustard to League Park concessions in 1925, and the Bertman Ball Park Mustard label still pours at every Guardians home game. David Dwoskin formed Davis Food Company in 1969 to bring the brown mustard served at Cleveland Municipal Stadium to retail shelves, registering the rival Stadium Mustard trademark in 1971, and Cleveland has been arguing about which yellow jar is better ever since.

   Taste it todayStadium Mustard

4. 1940s-1970s: Whitmore's Bar-B-Q and the Polish Boy

   Virgil Whitmore opened Whitmore's Bar-B-Q in Mount Pleasant in 1942, one of the first Black-owned sit-in restaurants in Cleveland. By the late 1960s his stacked-on-a-bun combination of grilled kielbasa, french fries, coleslaw and barbecue sauce was being called the Polish Boy, a name that has stuck as the city's unofficial sandwich.

   Taste it todayPolish BoyKielbasa

5. 2002-2010: Michael Symon, Iron Chef and the national spotlight

   Michael Symon won The Next Iron Chef in 2008 and James Beard Best Chef Great Lakes in 2009, and his Lola on East 4th Street helped launch the pedestrian block that still anchors Cleveland's restaurant scene. Lola closed in 2020 but the East 4th cluster Symon helped trigger remains the densest restaurant strip in the state.

6. 2015-2026: A new wave: Larder, Cordelia and the koji-curing era

   Jeremy Umansky's Larder Delicatessen and Bakery opened in the Hingetown firehouse in 2018, won James Beard recognition for fermentation and koji-aged charcuterie, and helped pull the city's editorial reputation away from the heavy-meat-and-cheese caricature.

   Taste it todayCordeliaLarder Delicatessen and Bakery

Immigrant influences

Polish

The largest single Eastern European cohort, settled in Slavic Village, Warszawa and Tremont from the 1880s.

Slovenian

Cleveland holds the largest Slovenian population of any city outside Slovenia. Sterle's Slovenian Country House on East 55th in St Clair-Superior fed generations of mill workers klobasa, potica and segedin until the dining room closed for walk-ins in the 2020s, and the St Vitus and St Mary parishes still run klobasa breakfasts.

Italian

The Murray Hill enclave of Little Italy formed in the 1890s around marble cutters for nearby Lake View Cemetery.

Hungarian

Buckeye Road on the east side was once called the second-largest Hungarian neighbourhood outside Budapest.

Cambodian, Vietnamese and Chinese

AsiaTown along Payne and Superior Avenues grew from the 1970s after the fall of Saigon and Phnom Penh.

African-American Southern migration

The Great Migration of the 1910s-1960s brought Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia barbecue, soul-food and sweet-tea traditions to Hough, Glenville, Mount Pleasant and Lee-Harvard.

Signature innovations

• The Polish Boy sandwich, kielbasa, fries, slaw and barbecue sauce on a bun
  Taste it todayPolish Boy
• Cleveland-style cassata cake with sponge, strawberries, custard and whipped cream
  Taste it todayCleveland-style cassata cake
• Stadium Mustard and Bertman Ball Park Mustard, the regional spicy brown condiment
  Taste it todayStadium Mustard
• Cleveland-style barbecue, locally fruitwood-smoked and Bertman mustard-glazed
  Taste it todayCleveland-style barbecue
• Pierogi as church-festival staple and Wigilia Christmas Eve supper tradition
  Taste it todayPierogi