Quality ingredients
Cornmeal crusts, never-bromated flour, small-batch wine, hand-rolled dough. The good version costs more and takes longer. We do it anyway.
Our Story
A Chicago family,
three generations deep.
Bravo Restaurants didn’t start as a restaurant company. It started as a Chicago family that kept choosing this city — and eventually fed it.
The Himmels have called Chicago home since the late 1800s, so keeping the business in the family always felt natural. The modern story starts with Ivan Himmel, who served in the Navy in World War II and first tried his hand at the fur trade before his father pointed him toward construction and homebuilding instead.
Building led, almost by accident, to pizza. Ivan’s son Jeff joined the business, and the family was already running pizza concepts of its own, Edwardo’s Natural Pizza among the earliest, before it took on Gino’s East and brought Chicago’s iconic deep dish under its care. As Ivan put it: “The pizza business found me.”
In 2019, the family handed the day to day over to Jordan Himmel, the third generation to lead the company. The timing could not have been harder. When COVID shuttered dining rooms across the country, Jordan was the one left in charge to steer Bravo through a catastrophe that threatened the entire industry. Rather than simply hold on, he made the most of the restaurants the family already had, finding inventive, creative ways to drive sales and win back repeat business. He reworked how the restaurants operate and set the company up to come out of the pandemic stronger than it went in. The business has grown and modernized under his leadership, proof that the family’s story is still being written.
Over more than sixty years, the family has owned and operated many restaurant brands, a few of them Chicago institutions, learning something from each one that shaped the next. Today that family is six brands across Chicagoland and beyond. The throughline has never changed. Food is a huge part of Chicago’s story, and our job is to keep that story alive while keeping it relevant. We serve more than food. We serve our family.
What we stand for
Three things we don’t compromise on.
Authenticity
Deep dish the way 1966 made it. New York bagels rolled the way they’ve been rolled since 1906. We don’t reinvent what already works — we protect it.
Family character
Three generations have run this business, and we treat the people who work here like part of it. That’s not a slogan; it’s how a family company survives sixty years.
Giving back
Good neighbors to our city and our lakes.
A business that plans to be here for another sixty years has to take care of the place it calls home. A few of the commitments we’ve made:
- Annual volunteer days with the Greater Chicago Food Depository
- Support for countless local charities and fundraising initiatives across the greater Chicago area
- Restaurant-wide recycling programs
- A $25,000 commitment to the Alliance for the Great Lakes
Leadership
Run by the family, every day.
The next generation runs Bravo today, backed by a corporate team that supports all six brands.
- Jordan Himmel Chief Operating Officer
- Jeff Himmel President