The Best Cincinnati Chili in Cincinnati

Visitors to Price Hill Chili are greeted with mementos from perhaps its most famous visitor: former Vice President Dick Cheney, who swung through on a reelection tour in 2004. (Contemporary reports say he was “too busy chatting” to eat but got chili to go for his campaign bus.) The vast majority of the time, however, this restaurant is for locals.

Most chili parlors don’t serve alcohol—a holdover from their Prohibition-era origins—but Price Hill Chili is attached to a full-service bar called the Golden Fleece. A fine selection of local beers and bourbons pairs nicely with this chili, a cinnamon-forward concoction with a surprising bit of lingering heat. Here, in particular, I appreciate the pairing of chili with crisp, neutral oyster crackers.

The restaurant’s sprawling complex of rooms, managed by second-generation owner Steve Beltsos, is a de facto community center for the tight-knit Price Hill neighborhood on Cincinnati’s West Side. When I ate here as a kid with my cousin Pat, a longtime resident, we couldn’t pass a table without being greeted by parishioners from her Catholic church or old students from her career as a school librarian. The walls hold lots of sports memorabilia from nearby Elder High, and alumni regularly gather to reminisce about their glory days over lunch.

Order: I lean into the heat of Price Hill Chili and order the Hot Chili Cheese Mett. The spicy, salty German mettwurst sausage, sourced from local purveyor Queen City Sausage, works wonders as a variation on the classic coney.

---

Bard’s Burgers & Chili

3620 Decoursey Ave., Covington, KY 41015

It’s hard to miss Bard’s Burgers & Chili’s biggest claim to fame: the Bardzilla Challenge. A massive mural on one side of the dining room taunts diners with a tower of 11 third-of-a-pound-pound patties and two pounds of fries.

But owner and chef Jordan Stephenson has put at least as much thought into his chili. When he took over the restaurant in the Latonia neighborhood of Covington, Kentucky, in 2015, it didn’t come with a chili recipe. So he developed his own from scratch, seeking opinions from a crew of taste testers who needed sustenance for the rigors of watching Cincinnati’s NFL squad.

“We kept dialing in the recipe on Sundays over some Bengals games,” Stephenson says. “I’d go to my buddy’s house, and everybody would try it and give me their feedback.” The result combines very finely minced beef and freshly ground spices, particularly suitable for going on top of hot dogs and hamburgers. Like all good Cincinnati-area chefs, Stephenson is cagey about the exact spice mix, but it’s heavy on the warm, comforting flavors, with a solid hit of clove.

Customers can still get their chili with a side of football, thanks to a couple of big-screen TVs in the restaurant’s bar area. And if the Bengals disappoint, there’s always the vintage Waterworld pinball table, where players come face-to-face with the stoic visage of Kevin Costner.

Order: For the best of both worlds, get the Chili Craig cheeseburger, named after a regular customer and designer of the restaurant’s logo. The chili topping gives even more flavor to the thick, juicy patty; Stephenson recommends decking it out with mustard and onions to mirror the coney experience. Pair this with a jumbo order of thick-cut pickle chips, fried to a crisp golden brown and guaranteed to vanish before your burger hits the table.

---

Blue Jay Restaurant

4154 Hamilton Ave., Cincinnati, OH 45223