Dell Rhea's Chicken Basket

If you pass through Willowbrook, Illinois, without stopping at Dell Rhea's Chicken Basket, you have made a mistake you should correct. This low-slung roadhouse on what was once Route Sixty-Six has been serving fried chicken since nineteen thirty-eight, making it one of the longest-continuously-operated roadside restaurants on the entire Mother Road.

The restaurant opened as a gas station and lunch counter, founded by Irv Kolarik. The idea was simple: travelers heading southwest out of Chicago needed a meal, and they needed it fast. Fried chicken was the answer. The recipe became the signature, battered and crisped to a formula that has not changed in eight decades. The building was expanded over the years, and after World War Two the dining room grew to accommodate the surge of postwar car culture that Route Sixty-Six both fed and accelerated.

Dell Rhea bought the restaurant in nineteen sixty-three, and his name stuck to the place permanently. His son Patrick took over after Dell died in nineteen ninety-two, and the Lombardi family bought it in twenty nineteen. That continuity is increasingly rare on the old highway, where most roadside institutions folded when Interstate Fifty-Five bypassed Route Sixty-Six in Illinois in the nineteen seventies, pulling traffic away almost overnight.

Dell Rhea's survived because locals loved it and because the Route Sixty-Six revival brought road-trippers and nostalgia-seekers back. The restaurant is now on the National Register of Historic Places, recognized not just as a building but as a living artifact of mid-century American travel culture. The neon sign, the dark-paneled interior, the chicken arriving in its paper-lined basket: these things have remained stubbornly constant while the road outside changed from a national artery to a heritage trail. On a summer Friday, the parking lot fills up again, and for a moment the bypass feels like it never happened.