In the late 1950s, the engineers routing Interstate 55 through DuPage County had no reason to think about a fried chicken counter on Joliet Road. They were solving a traffic problem, and the solution ran the new highway around the old one. For the roadhouse sitting where Route 66 used to carry every car between Chicago and St. Louis, the fix was closer to a death sentence. The bus stop dried up. The drive-by crowd that used to watch planes take off from the old Hinsdale Airport across the street had nowhere as scenic to look at anymore. Business slid so far that a local bank ended up holding the place until it could find someone willing to take it on.
That same stretch of Joliet Road spent a Saturday afternoon this year with a CW production crew parked outside, celebrity drivers pulling in for photos, and a public meet and greet running from 3 to 5 p.m. The building that survived getting bypassed is the reason Willowbrook, and not a bigger name on the map, ended up hosting a piece of Route 66's 100th birthday.
The building that survived getting bypassed
Dell Rhea's Chicken Basket started as a lunch counter inside Irv Kolarik's gas station sometime in the late 1920s. The fried chicken that made it famous wasn't Kolarik's idea. Sometime in the late 1930s, two local farm women walked in for coffee, overheard him complaining about the gas station side of the business, and offered him their fried chicken recipe if he'd agree to buy his chickens and eggs from their farm. He said yes. The counter outgrew the garage bays within a few years, and in 1946 the operation moved into the building next door, on what was then Hinsdale land and is now Willowbrook.
For the next decade, Route 66 did the marketing. The restaurant became a stop on the Bluebird Coach Lines bus route, and the interstate hadn't arrived yet to give travelers a faster way around it. Then I-55 did exactly that. Business dropped, the restaurant briefly changed hands, and for a stretch it operated under a bank's ownership while it waited for a buyer. Dell Rhea, who already ran the Woodbine Inn down the street, bought the place in 1963, kept the name and the menu, and added his own name to the sign. His son Patrick took over after Dell died in 1992. The Lombardi family bought the restaurant in 2019 and kept the recipe and the service the same way it had run for decades.
None of that history reads like a growth strategy. It reads like a business that survived because nobody had a reason to tear it down.
What actually rolled through this year
Route 66 turns 100 in 2026, and the national programming built around that anniversary landed on Joliet Road. The CW's Great American Road Rally, hosted by Ian Ziering, sends celebrity drivers down the length of Route 66 from Chicago to Santa Monica as part of a dual celebration of the highway's centennial and America's 250th birthday. Erik Estrada, John Schneider, and John O'Hurley are among the names on the driver list, and the production has been making public stops at towns along the route all year, most recently filming in Springfield, Missouri, on August 7. Earlier this year, before the rally worked its way that far west, one of its Illinois stops was Dell Rhea's Chicken Basket at 645 Joliet Rd., open to anyone who wanted to walk up and see the cars.
Separately, and without any television crew involved, the Hinsdale Public Library booked a talk called "Route 66: From Chicago to St. Louis" for May 19, 2026. The location wasn't the library. It was Dell Rhea's own Route 66 Room, with local historian John Kokoris presenting.
A few other things are true of the building right now, on any given week this year:
- The restored neon sign out front carries a National Register of Historic Places listing from May 5, 2006, shared that year with two other Illinois Route 66 stops, Lou Mitchell's and the Ariston Cafe.
- The kitchen turns out roughly 2,000 pounds of the restaurant's slow-cooked fried chicken every week.
- The Blue Rooster Lounge inside still runs a live band on Saturday nights.
- The Route 66 Room, the same space that hosted the library talk, has been used for community history programming before this centennial year gave it a national audience.
The room already had a name
That last point is the one easy to miss. Nobody built a Route 66 Room for the cameras. The space existed as a named, bookable part of the restaurant before any television producer called, which is why a small-town library looking for a serious history venue treated Dell Rhea's the way you'd treat a local museum rather than a place to grab dinner. When the sign itself was restored as part of that 2006 historic designation, close to 200 people turned out for the relighting, evidence that residents were already showing up at that address to mark shared history long before a CW crew found it useful.
As one guide to the county puts it:
Stepping into Dell Rhea's Chicken Basket is like stepping back in time.
That sentiment isn't a marketing line written for 2026. It describes a building that has looked and functioned roughly the same way since Dell Rhea bought it in 1963, because the traffic that would have forced it to change never came back.
Why Willowbrook and not somewhere flashier
If I-55 had left that stretch of Joliet Road alone, the roadhouse most likely would have kept pace with the highway the way plenty of Route 66 stops did elsewhere, expanding, relocating closer to an interchange, or eventually closing when a chain moved in with better access. Instead it sat mostly untouched for six decades because there was never enough drive-by traffic to justify tearing it down and building something newer in its place. That stagnation is precisely what the National Register wanted preserved in 2006, and it's precisely what made the building the natural, intact, camera-ready stop for a nationally broadcast centennial event twenty years later. Getting bypassed by the interstate is the reason there was still something worth pointing a camera at.
For anyone who already knows the fried chicken and has never thought much about the building around it, this is the year that building had a reason to matter beyond dinner. The broader Route 66 centennial calendar keeps running through the fall, and a restaurant that has already hosted both a CW production and a public library talk in the same season isn't likely to go quiet for the rest of the year. If you've never had a reason to stop, the corner of Joliet Road that most drivers speed past on their way to the interstate has spent this year proving there's more sitting inside it than the highway ever gave it credit for.
If you're curious what else has quietly changed around Willowbrook this year, our Willowbrook neighborhood guide keeps a running list of the parks, streets, and everyday spots residents ask about most. And if you're ever wondering what a home near a landmark like this is actually worth in today's market, the team at Shanon Tully is always glad to talk it through. Get your free home valuation whenever you're ready.
