a joint · ILUncle Remus Saucy Fried Chicken

A West Side Chicago fried-chicken counter whose sauce is in its name. Gus W. Rickette Sr. and Mary F. Rickette started it in 1963 as the G & G Chicken Shack and renamed it Uncle Remus in 1969; their daughter Charmaine Rickette Alfred runs it now. The company calls itself "a Black-owned and women-led business with a rich history rooted in Chicago's West Side."

Gus and Mary Rickette came to Chicago from Mississippi and opened the G & G Chicken Shack in 1963. The Uncle Remus name went up in 1969: first at 210 South Cicero in February, then at 5611 West Madison Street in August, in Austin. The Cicero shop is gone. Broadview followed in June 2004, Bronzeville at 747 East 47th Street in June 2015, and a small counter at 26th and Wabash after that.

Wikipedia names Uncle Remus, alongside Harold's Chicken Shack and Lem's Bar-B-Q, among the South and West Side restaurants that made mild sauce popular. Tradition holds — Charmaine Rickette told Block Club Chicago in 2020 that her father began serving mild sauce in the 1960s after watching customers mix ketchup and hot sauce themselves, which is the recipe in two moves; this project has that account secondhand and marks it unverified.

Inference — the family tells the story as a migration story, Leland to Chicago, and the sauce sits inside it rather than beside it: the shop's name is a sauce adjective.

The brand also polices itself. Its own site lists the addresses it stands behind and says any similarly named business is not affiliated. The founding year is not settled between the family's own pages either: the story page dates the first shack to 1963 and the rename to 1969, while the brand's other site carries "The Original Since 1968."

Three official locations as of September 2026, per the company: 5611 West Madison Street in Chicago, 1801 Roosevelt Road in Broadview, and a cashless micro counter at 2537 South Wabash Avenue inside Picnic. The company's story page also lists the Bronzeville shop on East 47th Street, which the three-location page does not; this record does not resolve that.