Levy Brand Guidelines: A 1978 Chicago Deli, Ballpark Suites & Compass

A deli in Water Tower Place, 1978.

Levy began with a sandwich counter. In 1978, the Chicago Tribune reported in January 2019, the brothers Larry and Mark Levy became passive investors in D.B. Kaplan’s, a delicatessen in Chicago’s Water Tower Place, the shopping centre on North Michigan Avenue. Within months, the paper said, it was clear they would lose their money, so they took over the restaurant themselves and brought in their mother, Eadie, and her family recipes from St. Louis. The deli became a long-running success and closed in 1995.

Levy tells the same story on its own history page, under the heading “It All Began In Chicago,” and dates the company’s birth to that 1978 investment. From the deli it built a group of Chicago restaurants. The Tribune listed Spiaggia, Jake Melnick’s and River Roast among them, and said the company’s offices sat above Spiaggia on North Michigan Avenue in 2019. Its website today lists Jake Melnick’s Corner Tap and River Roast in Chicago, and Terralina and Paddlefish at Disney Springs in Florida.

The Florida restaurants have their own date. Levy says it began creating, owning and operating restaurants at Walt Disney World Resort in 1989, and English Wikipedia also dates its selection by the Walt Disney Company to that year.

Skyboxes, then whole stadiums.

The move into sport came, by the company’s account, almost by chance. The Tribune reported that in 1982 the Chicago White Sox asked Levy to cater the private boxes at the old Comiskey Park, hoping to make the leases more attractive to companies. Levy at first declined, then agreed. Its chief executive, Andy Lansing, told the paper that the company got into sports hospitality “totally by accident,” and that its approach was to bring restaurant-quality food and service to places where people least expected it.

Levy’s history page dates Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs, to 1985. By 2019 the Tribune listed Wrigley Field, Guaranteed Rate Field and the United Center among its Chicago venues, called Levy the largest sports and entertainment hospitality company in the United States, and said it was catering its fifth Super Bowl, at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta. The paper said Lansing had joined in 1988 as general counsel, became president in 1995 and succeeded Larry Levy as chief executive in 2004.

The Super Bowl is a useful marker of that growth. The Tribune said Levy’s first was Super Bowl 33 in Miami, two decades before the Atlanta game, and that it had also worked the 2006 game at Ford Field in Detroit. For the Atlanta game it described a menu that paired stadium staples with regional dishes, which the paper set within a wider trend for local food brands inside stadiums. Beyond sport, the paper said, Levy’s roster had grown to include the Harley-Davidson Museum in Milwaukee.

Its website now sorts its work by setting: sports and entertainment, restaurants, retail, cultural attractions and convention centres. Under sport it lists American football, baseball, basketball, hockey, soccer and college sport, along with motorsports, horse racing, music festivals, tennis, golf and skiing.

Ownership changed in two steps. Levy’s history page says that in 2000 it partnered with Compass Group North America, based in Charlotte, a subsidiary of the British Compass Group PLC. The Tribune gave the detail: Compass bought 49 percent of Levy in 2000 and acquired the rest of the company in 2006. English Wikipedia also describes Levy as a wholly owned Compass subsidiary since 2006.

How contract caterers present themselves.

Contract caterers sell a service that happens inside someone else’s building, so their brands have to work in two places at once: on the corporate pages where owners and clients read about them, and on the counters, menus and uniforms that guests see. Most of their public material shows food and venues rather than the company itself. Delaware North’s history page, for example, tells its story as a slide show of dated photographs, and Levy’s press room is a run of venue announcements.

Large groups split that work into sectors. Compass Group says it organises its business by market, a model it calls “sectorisation,” delivered through a portfolio of brands; its sectors include business and industry, healthcare and senior living, education, and sports and leisure. In that model a workplace canteen, a school kitchen and a stadium concourse can each carry a different name, even when one parent owns them all.

Some companies go the other way. In November 2014 Delaware North announced one global identity, dropped “Companies” and the DNC initials from its logo, and folded most of its operating units into a single name, keeping Sportservice as a named exception. Levy, owned by Compass since 2006, has instead added named units of its own, from E15 to Rank + Rally, each with its own launch year.

For a reader trying to understand these brands, the most useful sources are the companies’ own history and ownership pages, read alongside dated reporting. This guide gives founding dates, owners and contracts only as those sources state them, attributes each claim, and treats the visual identity described here as an unofficial interpretation rather than a reproduction of any company’s mark.

A family of sub-brands.

Inside Compass, Levy has built its own set of named businesses, each with a launch year on its history page. E15, a data and analytics company, made its debut in 2014. Levy Convention Centers was formalised as a division in 2017, and Rank + Rally, its retail arm, launched the same year; the company says its work has included a 50th-anniversary clothing line for the St. Louis Blues and a Chicago Cubs pop-up shop on the Magnificent Mile. DBK Studio, an innovation studio for guest technology, followed in 2022, and a Special Events division in 2023.

Each of those names stands apart from the parent word “Levy,” so the brand works as a family of sub-brands rather than one mark stretched across everything. The restaurants keep their own names too, from Jake Melnick’s to Paddlefish. The company’s website closes its history with the line “More Than 40 Years Later, We Still Love What We Do,” and its footer names Compass under the heading “Proud Part of.” The site credits its own design to an outside studio, Fathead Design.

Levy’s press room carries a steady flow of venue announcements. A release dated June 2026 said Levy now oversaw the restaurants, snack locations and event catering at the Tulsa Zoo. In October 2026 the women’s soccer club Boston Legacy FC named Levy its food and beverage partner for White Stadium, and the release said the partnership would spotlight local restaurants and chefs alongside menus created for the stadium.

For a design guide, Levy shows how a business can keep a founder’s surname and a deli’s warmth while growing a portfolio of sharper sub-brands under a much larger owner. Compare Compass Group, its parent, and Delaware North, another American stadium caterer with roots in family concessions. For this guide we use a deli red, a rye cream and a mustard with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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