Jamila Ismail was sitting in a booth in an otherwise empty dining room on a recent Thursday afternoon while a massive gyro cone was rotating around a flame in the kitchen at Italian Express, as staff prepared to field dozens of takeout orders that typically start piling in around 5 p.m.
She said the red booth covers were replaced about 10 years ago, but the bones are from 2001, when the suburban Glendale Heights restaurant first opened. Her late husband, Mohammed Ismail, bought the original Italian Express in 1986 in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood from a family known for making cacciatore, primavera and chicken Vesuvio.
Gyro was not on the menu and nothing was halal yet. In 1990, they officially started serving halal Italian American food.
“When I think back to when we were just settling in America and now that we are open for 40 years, bohot kuch dil mein hai, bohot yaadein,” she said, mixing Urdu and English as many first-generation immigrants do. There is a lot in my heart, a lot of memories.
The halal iteration of Italian Express is widely considered the first fast-food restaurant to use halal meat in all of Chicagoland, said Omar Ali, treasurer and founding board member of the Illinois Muslim Chamber of Commerce.
“I still remember when Italian Express went halal and started selling gyros, burgers and wings. It was the first time we had a gyro sandwich or pizza with meat, or halal pasta dishes from outside,” said Ali, who grew up in Chicago’s Jefferson Park before his family moved to Glen Ellyn. “It was a big deal, when you think about it now … that was very, very significant.”
During the 1980s and ’90s, Pakistani and Indian restaurants and grocery stores on Devon Avenue were effectively the earliest halal food providers in the greater Chicago area. But out in the western suburbs, halal options remained sparse well into the late 1990s.
Growing up next door to Lombard and attending an Islamic high school in the suburb, Ali remembers a small cluster of places — Italian Express’s suburban presence, restaurants like Zak’s Pizza, Pasta & Wings and a low-key spot inside a halal grocer — against a backdrop where Muslim teens still relied on Taco Bell and Subway.
These days, Ali finds it “hard to even keep up with the number” of halal restaurants in the Chicago area.
Despite the barrage of new eateries springing up around them offering customers seemingly endless takeout options for lunch and dinner, the family behind Italian Express saw no reason to change what’s worked for the past four decades.
Jamila Ismail is too humble to call herself one of the original pioneers of the halal-food boom in the Chicago area, but she gladly gives that credit to her husband.
When he died three years ago, he asked his family to take care of their restaurant, she said, flicking a tear off her cheek.
“He had a good life, he did all the things he wanted to do and he helped so many people open their own halal restaurants while doing it,” she said. “People will always remember him for that.”
The early years of stumbling into success
When Mohammed Ismail immigrated to the United States in 1972, he slowly settled into a tiny one-bedroom apartment in Rogers Park. He came to attend college while seeking an income so his wife could join him in America, which she did in 1979, arriving in Chicago from Pakistan during a winter blizzard.
“It was hard work to get settled, but we were so happy to do it,” Jamila Ismail said.
While walking around the neighborhood in those early weeks, Mohammed Ismail found Calo on North Clark Street, a still-standing Italian restaurant that needed help in the kitchen. He learned how to make pizza dough, fresh tomato sauce, pasta primavera, cacciatore and other things he’d never eaten before. When he wasn’t working or at school, he drove a taxi cab. Soon, he had been at Calo for 12 years.
“Because he used to go to work from morning to evening, I used to explore,” Jamila Ismail said with a sweet laugh. “I (learned) how the trains run, how the buses run and I would just step outside and go.”
She stumbled across a tutoring center in the Loop that needed someone to tutor English language learners.
“Can you believe it? I started to teach people English,” she said. “And then, they needed someone to teach the students, who were all immigrants like me and my husband, the (U.S.) Constitution … I didn’t know anything. So I went to the library and read so many books.”
Jamila Ismail laughed. She said it had been a long time since she thought about those memories, though some never really fade.
She remembered one day when it all began.
Sometime in 1983, Jamila Ismail’s in-laws arrived from Pakistan. They took them to dinner at a local spot on Western Avenue called Italian Express. Mohammed was friends with one of the owners, and the staff was friendly with everyone from Calo, she explained. So when Mohammed and Jamila Ismail asked if they could bring their own halal ground beef to substitute the non-halal meat for a special family dinner, the restaurant obliged. The friend cooked pasta bolognese, and her in-laws were impressed, she said.
“My mother-in-law turned to my husband that day, while we were still eating, and said ‘Aisi koi dukan lelo, aur halal rakh sab.’” You should get a restaurant just like this, and make everything halal.
“Even in his last days, my husband would say to me, ‘Ami nai kaha tha,’ Jamila Ismail said. My mother had told me to do this.
Eventually, the owners decided to sell, and Mohammed bought Italian Express. They kept the name and, by 1990, had converted each menu item to halal, a heavy undertaking given there was no halal restaurant infrastructure in Chicago.
Jamila Ismail said her husband was deeply committed to serving his customers halal meat. She said he’d come home in the evenings and tell her how it just didn’t sit right with him to touch, cut and cook sausages made from pork and pizzas with standard non-halal meat toppings. It was difficult for him to work in a kitchen that wasn’t aligned with his religious values, as pork is explicitly forbidden in the Quran, which includes guidelines on dietary laws that promote spiritual and physical well-being.
He tried his best to find halal meat suppliers, but at that time in the U.S., there was no real domestic market for halal pepperoni, sausage and bacon. That entire supply chain had to be built from scratch, she said.
“When he was visiting Dubai, he saw at a market, a row full of halal meat products — there was bacon and sausage, salami, pepperoni, and the label said it was made in the U.S.A.,” she shrieked. “As soon as my husband returned home, he called them.”
He tracked down the supplier listed on the products and started placing orders and figuring out how to make it work.
Friends warned them that switching to halal was a risk with their existing non-Muslim customers. But Jamila Ismail said those customers just wanted the same food they always ordered. They didn’t know or care what “halal” meant as long as they got their sausage pizza, she laughed.
It took years for the restaurant to switch all its meat to halal. At first, they kept many of the classic Italian dishes on the menu, both for their regular customers and because her husband and his cooks could expertly make dishes like pepper steak, ribs and Chicago-style chicken Vesuvio with potato wedges and green peas.
Muslim families in the neighborhood would come in eagerly asking if the restaurant was indeed halal, she said.
But it wasn’t until they introduced the famed gyro and fast-food options that they took off.
The gyro uses a secret family recipe
The gyro is the star of the menu, and everyone picking up takeout orders agreed unanimously.
Jamila Ismail and her husband created the recipe in the early ’90s, in partnership with the Islamic Food and Nutrition Council of America and restaurant supplier Olympia Foods. The only thing she divulged about the gyro is that it’s made with 100% beef, unlike other cones on the market that mix in lamb.
Olympia Foods, which is IFANCA-certified, supplies gyro to many restaurants in Chicagoland, but Jamila Ismail explained that the Italian Express recipe is unique to their place.
“It’s truly a secret recipe,” she said.
Anzur Ismail, Jamila and Mohammed Ismail’s daughter, said the origin story of the gyro is that her parents “just really wanted to sell gyro,” she laughed.
In their early years in America, Jamila Ismail said she and her husband sometimes ate non-halal meat because they didn’t know where to find halal options, and that’s when they first tried gyro. After that, she kept asking her husband to add a halal gyro to their menu.
“Actually, before we started selling the Olympia gyro, there was no halal-gyro distributor in Chicago at all,” Anzur Ismail said. “My dad went to IFANCA and basically said, ‘Can you find out how we can make this?’”
Italian Express’s gyro is delivered from Olympia’s kitchen in Franklin Park twice weekly. It comes in 40-pound cones, which are frozen to maintain freshness and flavor. Each day, the kitchen staff unwraps the gyro and places it on the vertical rotisserie where the meat is roasted slowly and shaved off into thin slices as it browns along the edges.
Italian Express sells a regular version and a spicy one by the pound, or in a “gyro sandwich” which is really a wrap made with naan, lettuce, tomato, onion and an optional (but highly suggested) side of giardiniera, with house-made tzatziki and hot sauce.
The menu has many more Italian and American items: wings, mozzarella sticks, onion rings, Philly cheesesteak, cheeseburgers, hot dogs, Italian beef. And for their pizzas, they offer gyro as a topping.
Halal restaurants in the Chicago area continue to multiply
According to Ali from the Illinois Muslim Chamber of Commerce, the real halal restaurant “boom” came after COVID-19.
“I’ve seen the growth happen in front of my eyes, where in Lombard alone, there was one (halal) restaurant … and then another … and then it started to take off,” Ali said. “Now we’re at the point where every building permit that’s pulled is a chai shop or a burger restaurant.”
There are a number of slaughtering practices that qualify meat as halal, including guidelines that emphasize humane animal treatment. There are now around 32 halal spots in Lombard alone, Ali said, including 10 that are considered halal American fast-food.
According to data from the Halal Food Standards Alliance of America, there are 125 halal-certified restaurants in Chicago and its suburbs. Ali said that figure would rise to over 200 if counting restaurants that are halal but not certified by agencies.
New halal restaurant concepts are constantly popping up, Ali said. For example, Serai Cafe, a new sub sandwich shop on North Clark Street that opened last October, is being pegged by its owners as “Chicago’s first halal deli.”
Ali hopes that new Muslim restaurateurs explore different cuisines instead of contributing to an “oversaturated burger market.” “I think over time, the market itself will play a role and things will shift based on the demand,” he said.
But when compared to the ’90s, when Italian Express was building out a system that second- and third-generation immigrant entrepreneurs benefit from today, oversaturation is only a narrow issue.
For Italian Express, word of mouth was the primary driver of its popularity over the years. And as the family eventually relocated from the original small Western Avenue building to the current one on Devon Avenue, Anzur Ismail said building a loyal customer base took time, especially since the name “Italian Express” hardly hinted at a halal restaurant run by a Pakistani Muslim family.
Anzur Ismail, a 44-year-old immigration attorney who handles deportation defense cases, somehow finds time to manage the Italian Express city location, which she visits a few times a week.
During Operation Midway Blitz last fall, when federal agents were making arrests throughout immigrant communities across Chicago, Devon Avenue was deserted, she said.
“People were not going outside, our employees were afraid to come to work, but we couldn’t stop functioning because people have to feed their families. They can’t just not go to work,” she said.
As the deportation cases kept piling up on her desk, so did questions around the restaurant and how it might survive unscathed, she said.
“It was a really scary time. We went all in to make sure we could keep paying our employees and ultimately being a fixture in the community went a long way,” she said. “It’s nice to see Devon slowly return to what it was before (the raids), but there is still so much uncertainty.”
Anzur Ismail said the family has always needed to be practical to survive in a turbulent industry. For one, they don’t give any thought (or money) to influencer marketing and prefer to “rely on the aunties to spread the word.”
They also don’t plan to expand much more, but did sell the restaurant’s first-ever franchise location in Naperville to a family friend last year.
Over the years, prices have fluctuated purely based on necessity, but even then, the difference wasn’t too noticeable, she said.
Fatimah Amin, Anzur Ismail’s younger cousin, chimed in, laughing about the free Pepsi they used to hand out. Anzur Ismail started laughing too: “Oh my god, the Pepsi.”
“You know how at normal businesses, if you buy five pizzas, you get one Pepsi for free? Well, here if you bought five pizzas, you got five 1-liter Pepsis for free,” Anzur Ismail chortled.
Amin, who’s one of the faces of the Glendale Heights location, said they put a stop to the free Pepsi last year, while on Devon Avenue, they pulled the sodas just a couple of months ago.One of her goals is to get their Google rating up. The Chicago location sits at 3.8 stars, while Glendale Heights is up to 4.3.
“I feel like because we’ve been around forever and people grew up eating our food, no one thinks about writing a review unless they had a bad experience,” she said. “You’ll have someone who has never written a review, and then one time they don’t like something, it’s a one-star. Obviously, our longtime customers will always be with us, but we can still reach new people instead of them only going to the newer, trendier spots.”
Second generation poised to make good on a promise
Anzur Ismail remembered being a little girl when her parents worked out their dream, and it had always been a family effort. At 10, she’d climb up on a stool to answer phone calls, scribble down orders and finish her homework. After long school days, she and her older sister sometimes drifted off to sleep near the back, lining up chairs to create a makeshift bed.
Amin, feels like she, too, grew up at the restaurant. Her dad, Mohammad Ismail’s younger brother, Mohammad Amin, has managed the Glendale Heights location for about eight years, but even before that, her family lived close enough to help whenever needed. Amin, 24, now lives with her husband within walking distance of the restaurant, which has a neon sign reading “Italian Express.” Next to it is a neon sign that says “Ghosted Penguin,” the name of her dessert business.The restaurant’s front glass case is frequently lined with her cakes, cheesecakes, brownies and an assortment of classic South Asian items like kheer, a sweet rice pudding.
She’s a warm front-of-house personality. Even when the gyro takeout orders start stacking up, she handles it swiftly and softly.
“This is like my second home,” she said.
The dining room doesn’t usually fill up, Amin said, unless it’s a weekend or if some of the regulars bring visiting family members. Most of the business is fueled by pizza and gyro pickups, both items that hold up extremely well, she noted.
Anzur Ismail said she’s noticed that many newer halal restaurants either struggle to carve out their own identity or quickly fizzle once the initial influencer buzz fades.
“I think our longevity really has to do with family,” she said. “We just can’t be away from the restaurant because we grew up in the restaurant.”
When customers call to place an order, it’s usually Amin, her dad or another family member who stopped by to help who picks up the phone. They’ve gotten good at remembering which customers always require extra white sauce by the sound of voices or the first few digits of a phone number.
“There’s a personal touch when it’s the actual family running it,” Amin added. “If somebody wants to find us — well, you just come to the restaurant.”
Jamila Ismail doesn’t come to the Glendale Heights location too often to help anymore, but being there that day before it got busy reminded her of the days she used to restock the pizza boxes and takeout containers or take deep inventory of each ingredient needed to keep the kitchen humming.
When they first opened the suburban spot, it was her home base while Mohammad Ismail operated the city one.
“But whenever he did come here, my husband used to go to each and every table to talk to the customers; he became friends with everyone,” she said, looking around. She smiles widely at each person approaching the counter, noting that it’ll get busier and busier as early evening nears. “We have to take care of this.”
Italian Express Restaurant, 2447 W. Devon Ave., 773-761-7700; 2041 Bloomingdale Road, Glendale Heights, 630-539-7600; italianexpresschicago.com
