Chicago native Nick Tague was the first customer in line for the opening of Portillo's in The Colony.
Chicago restaurant Portillo’s opens first Texas restaurant in The Colony
Find these iconic Italian beef sandwiches and hot dogs in The Colony.
Texas’ first Portillo’s Italian beef sandwich and hot dog restaurant opens at 4 p.m. Jan. 9, 2023 in The Colony.
This 60-year-old restaurant’s expansion from its home city of Chicago into the Dallas suburbs was one of the most tantalizing food stories of 2022. There’s even a Facebook page devoted to tracking the restaurant’s progress.
It was late 2022 that the company expected to open its doors in Grandscape, the master development near Nebraska Furniture Mart near State Highway 121 and the Dallas North Tollway. Construction delays pushed the restaurant’s debut into 2023, which means it’s now on our list of most exciting new restaurants opening in Dallas-Fort Worth this year.
Portillo’s sells Chicago street food: hot dogs, burgers, fries, onion rings and a legendary Italian beef sandwich.
Photos: Chicago restaurant Portillo's feeds its first guests in Texas, in The Colony
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“If people are coming to Portillo’s and they’re eating one thing, I’d say get a beef sandwich. It’ll blow your mind,” CEO Michael Osanloo told The Dallas Morning News in March 2022. The beef is slow-roasted, thinly shaved, and served on French bread. It gets dunked in a bath of au jus, called gravy.
“It’s a hot mess,” Osanloo says. Better grab some extra napkins.
Lunch or dinner here should end with the company’s famous chocolate cake, the CEO says. You can get a free slice of it on your birthday. Or, he recommends the chocolate cake shake, a mix of half a slice of chocolate cake and ice cream.
Osanloo grew up in a suburb of Chicago and says Portillo’s was the first place he drove after he got his driver’s license. He ate two Italian beef sandwiches that day; he still remembers.
From the company’s beginnings in 1963 as a hot dog stand in Illinois, Portillo’s has grown to California, Florida, Arizona, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin. The restaurant in The Colony is Texas’ first — and a major moment for Dallasites’ love for Chicago food.
This restaurant opening in Texas is akin to Yuengling’s beer debut in our state a year and a half prior. Or In-N-Out, the California burger joint that stirred such happiness when it opened in Dallas in 2011 that a woman cried as we caught her eating a burger.
All three are iconic companies that many Texans thought might never reach the Lone Star State.
The reason Texas came next was simple, the CEO tells us: It’s Portillo’s No. 1 state for the “shop and ship” program, which mails Italian beef sandwiches and Chicago-style hot dog ingredients across the country.
Portillo’s superfans can meet Michael Portillo, the vice president of restaurant support and a member of the family, at a ribbon cutting ceremony on Jan. 18, 2023 at 10:30 a.m.
The restaurant, built from the ground up, is nearly 8,000 square feet. It also has a drive-through. Customers will see a vintage 1967 Toyota Stout vehicle on the property, a nod to the Toyota headquarters nearby.
Expect long lines as the restaurant serves its first customers.
Portillo’s is at 4560 Destination Drive (at Grandscape), The Colony. It opened at 4 p.m. Jan. 9. 2023.
For more food news, follow Sarah Blaskovich on Twitter at @sblaskovich.
