Elis Cheesecake appears as a signature dish in 1 United States cities. See each city's local variant and where to eat it.
Eli's Cheesecake · Chicago
Chicago-style cheesecake: golden-brown skin, dense creamy interior, baked on an all-butter shortbread cookie crust. Created by Eli Schulman in 1980 for Taste of Chicago; now the city's signature dessert.
Eli Schulman ran Eli's Ogden Huddle (1940), Eli's Stage Delicatessen, and Eli's The Place for Steak (1966) in Chicago, where Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. were regulars. In the late 1970s he developed his cheesecake recipe over a year of after-lunch testing, finalising four versions: original plain, chocolate chip, cinnamon raisin, and Hawaiian. The cake debuted at the inaugural Taste of Chicago in 1980 and sold so well that Eli's Cheesecake Company spun off as a standalone business. Eli's Original Plain has sold more than 2 million slices at Taste of Chicago and is consistently called Chicago's most famous dessert.