Spurs’ Diss Misses the Mark
In the realm of this Dad’s favorite eats Skyline Chili stands alone.
We’ve spilled the sauce on Cincinnati’s famous chili spaghetti a couple times in this space. And though I’m a big fan of grilled burgers, and brats, and New Year’s pork and sauerkraut, and pizza glory in several permutations, including Chicago’s and Ohio’s, the blessed three-way trinity of noodles, sauce and a mound of finely-grated cheddar just can’t be topped.
When it comes to spreading the gospel of chili, we’re generous with our portions, and all too happy to explain the origin story of this unique dish. We graciously welcome converts.
So we’re more than a little bemused by those who just don’t get it. Case in point: news this week of a tweet misfired by the Spurs marketing team.
According to Uni-Watch, and reported widely by a few others, including the Cincinnati Enquirer, and AwfulAnnouncing.com, to help hype a Sunday matinee NBA game between San Antonio and Cleveland, the Spurs attempted to troll the Cavs by making fun of Skyline Chili.
The tweet — soon-deleted — featured an altered Skyline Chili logo reading “5 Way Chili”, a cowboy boot stomping on a plate of chili spaghetti, and the message “real chili doesn’t have noodles.”
The main problem? Chili spaghetti is a Cincinnati thing. And Cleveland is 250 miles from Cincinnati.
As Uni-Watch points out, Columbus is also a “C” city. Confusing, confounding, crazy — we know.
And as Awful Announcing picked up, the enterprising social media marketer, while enterprising enough to alter the Skyline Logo to presumably make their diss apply to all chili spaghetti, left Cincinnati’s skyline in. (Hint: it’s not Cleveland’s. Or Columbus’s.)
One other element that got my chili-spaghetti purist sensibilities, um, over-spiced, was the assumption that “5-Way Chili” constitutes the standard. That’s not so — or at least I’ve been taught. Since chili-spaghetti is, at its core, “two-way” (chili and spaghetti), and the base iteration is three-way, which includes that essential mound of cheese. Beans? Onions? Very much optional.
But hey, not only did San Antonio lose the thread and delete the tweet: as has been routine during a 6-30 season, they lost the game.
Sympathy for the Marketer
Uni-Watch went on to speculate that since the tweet lacked a certain basis in, well, reality, the Spurs marketer who conceived it had to be someone junior, and inexperienced, social media being a relatively new means of marketing.
(Relatively, if you consider anything since 2008 new. That’s been long enough that this old guy has spent the majority of his career in it.)
But that’s a bit of an assumption. In short, they got it wrong, and in a comically simple way, at least to those from Ohio.
But as was pointed out in the news coverage, would San Antonio be as forgiving if we threw some Houston or Dallas cultural memes their way?
I have sympathy for the wayward Spurs marketer, though. Skyline Chili was top of my mind this week as I prepared to share the sacred dish with members of my son’s Boy Scout troop as they worked on American Cultures merit badge. Although I’ve written about my family’s appreciation for Cincinnati Chili several times, it was only in the paper I wrote for Autobiography Workshop as an undergrad where I attempted to share the story of Skyline Chili itself. Attempted, because I got it wrong.
I still have a cocoa- and cinnamon-stained page 1 from that paper in our recipe box, that’s been shared with friends and still referenced whenever I brew a batch. But imprinted in my mind was the story I wrote about “Tuscan Tony.” Turns out, this was fabricated, probably as a placeholder in my class paper during those early Internet 1990s days when Skyline may not have even had a website. I’d like to think the newspaper journalist I became only a couple years later would have checked and checked and rechecked. (I know I would have.)
So, confession time: the story of Antonio DiCilio emigrating from Italy in 1918 and bringing his family recipe with him was patently false. And fortunately, one I never repeated and one that never saw professional print, as any time I wrote about Skyline after that I was sharing my family’s personal association with the dish, going back 50+ years to my dad scarfing it as a University of Cincinnati student.
Today’s Skyline Chili website has its origin story front and center:
As a child, our founder, Nicholas Lambrinides, watched and learned as his mother lovingly prepared her unique family recipes in their hometown of Kastoria, Greece. He marveled at the magical blend of flavors and dreamed of one day sharing her culinary delights with the world.
Opportunity knocked when the family moved to America. They settled in the bustling Midwestern town of Cincinnati, Ohio. And in 1949, Nicholas realized his dream when he opened the doors of his first restaurant, perched atop Price Hill on the cityās West Side. His view of the downtown cityscape inspired the name and Skyline Chili was born.
https://www.skylinechili.com/
Interestingly, Skyline was only third or fourth to the parlor phenomenon in Cincinnati, although all were Greek in origin. According to this excellent piece by a Queen City native, Empress Chili was first to open in 1922, followed by Dixie Chili, in 1940. After Skyline in 1949, Gold Star settled in by 1965, and others have followed.
So, we do what we can to set the record straight. As for the Spurs’ record, maybe next year?
Dadsense 
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