April 30, 2025: This original website is returning more than a decade after closing due to recognizing a need that will become more apparent in time. Growing up in a "chili family" with history dating back to the southern Illinois coal mining days of the late 1890's,, I've cringed over some of what I've read and seen on video. I've been eating chili, famous chili, since second grade, which would be about the year 1958, two years after my "Aunt Momo" and "Uncle Ernie" opened the Burbank Chili John's and eleven years before my dad Mickey and mom Edna LaMere took it over. I'm here to tell the real stories. I worked in the chili parlor in the 1980's and long before that learned of the history from Ernie himself. Both myself and my husband Wayne Logan learned to make the chili from Mickey LaMere, who was taught by his uncle Ernie Isaac who learned to make it from his father, John Isaac. John learned to make it from a Mexican coal miner way back in John's father's coal mining days. John's father Frank worked the coal mines in southern Illinois and brought young son John along. John was given the name "Little John" and given the job of tending to the mules, which kept him busy and out of trouble while father Frank worked. Ernie later honored this part of the story by painting a mule being walked along the road on the large mural which runs the length of the Burbank chili parlor wall which he painted before opening in 1946.

Warning: Do not believe everything you read in print. Journalists misread their notes, fill in stories with guesses or worse, sometimes deliberately mislead. A few examples: I read where dad's four daughters grew up in Burbank and graduated from Burbank High. My oldest sister never lived in Burbank or attended school there and I did not arrive in Burbank until two months before my junior year was up, except for family visits when we drove to L.A. to visit Ernie and Myrt. One local journalist wrote about Mickey LaMere's chili rating on a story published by Los Angeles Magazine in 1975. In her local story she stated that out of the 25 restaurants rated for the "Hottest Chili in Town," the text declared Chili John's placed behind Chasen's of Beverly Hills. That was not true, three of the 25 restaurants rated received the top rating of 3 stars and TIED for first place. Then there is the deliberate misleading by a famous chili history author which will be covered in its own chapter and point out some very suspicious motives for his deliberate untruth. Stay tuned.