It all started in 1940, when Eli Schulman found a foreclosure sign on the door of his favorite coffee shop. On a whim and with his mother’s recipes (he had never run a restaurant), he bought the place! Great food and a magnetic personality put him on the map, and the rest is history. Forty years and a few restaurants later, Eli declared cheesecake to be the signature dessert at the legendary Eli’s: The Place For Steak. It was there that he created Chicago Style Cheesecake.
When Eli’s iconic cheesecake debuted at the first Taste of Chicago in 1980, Marc Schulman, Eli’s son and only child, had a vision to bring Eli’s signature dessert outside the restaurant’s walls. Today, Eli’s Cheesecake has become one of the country’s largest specialty dessert makers. Marc is joined by his daughter Elana, making Eli’s a third-generation family business. Eli’s is guided by its founder’s golden rules: “Charity will never bust you” and “treat the other as if you were the other.”