In Search of Hot Beef

The other Juicy Lucy, Minnesota's signature sandwich that you never heard of.

by

One of the great vexations of writing about Northern cuisine, as opposed to Southern, is our lack of iconic restaurant foods. The South has so much, like biscuits, pimento cheese, barbecue, fried chicken. We have—what, exactly?

Our small-town cafés served pie; we can all agree on that. Eggs and bacon and hash browns. Toast. At some point in the mid-20th century, we got hamburgers and fries. These are not exactly foods that lend themselves to Faulknerian rhapsody among the tupelo trees.

Yet one particular Northern food-culture question has been tickling at the edges of my mind for years. It has to do with something that’s sometimes called a “beef commercial sandwich,” sometimes called “hot beef.” I decided this year to get to the bottom of it. Where did it begin? Where is it now?

I got a ping back from the news archives, and the summer of 1952, when The Minneapolis Tribune took a few inches away from the dire issues of the day to reprint an editorial from The Christian Science Monitor. “Much was my consternation the first time I sat down in a modern American eatery and ordered the advertised ‘Hot Beef Sandwich,’” the author started. “What I got was a perfectly straightforward Beef à l’Angleterre”—an intentionally pretentious phrase for roast beef.

The author went on to describe the sandwich: beef served between two pieces of bread, with mashed potatoes inside the sandwich(!), and the whole beef-mashed potato brick smothered in gravy. But here was the author’s problem: It was impossible to eat with “the fingers, on account of the gravy, among other things . . . . I do not want to carp, but let us have some respect for tradition.”

Why did The Minneapolis Tribune choose to run this, when the hot beef sandwich—bread, mashed potatoes, some form or other of roast beef, gravy coating—had been common for at least a generation? I suspect that reprint fits in a noble Minnesota newspaper tradition: calling out what these boneheads on the coasts have to say now. (See: grape salad.)

I’m pretty sure that I am the specific human being who first wrote about the Ju(i)cy Lucy—our burger with the cheese inside—after noticing it on a couple of local menus. (See “A Tribe Called Lucy,” in an August, 1998, issue of City Pages.) Nowadays, there’s a small juicy-lucy chain in Lima, Peru, and a brand new juicy lucy restaurant in Staten Island—yes, in New York City.

I’d seen what it looks like when a Northern food entered the canon and became famous. So I went out in search of hot beef. Or the hot beef commercial. At the outset, I really didn’t know what it should properly be called.

I first got in touch with Tracey Deutsch, an associate professor of history at the University of Minnesota, who has a great interest in food and Holmesian powers of inquiry and research. By the 1910s, she reported back, hot beef sandwiches were common throughout Minnesota.

With that lead and time frame, I took to my telephone to quiz the Women Who Would Know. Women like Marilyn Hagerty (born in 1926), the very features editor for The Grand Forks Herald. (You may remember when she leapt to viral fame after giving a positive review to a local Olive Garden, which led to Today Show and Anderson Cooper appearances and a whole circus.) When did Hagerty first encounter this gravy-drenched hot beef? The date escaped her: It was already utterly common around 1940, when she started writing for the Capital Journal, in Pierre, South Dakota.

“If you lived in the country and were going in to town, especially the men, they’d order that,” Hagerty told me. “Bread and meat, with the gravy over it. Often there would be some vegetable on the side: carrots or corn, a basic thing. There was the same plate with pork, with pork gravy. That’s what most restaurants had. In my experience, it’s always been this way.”

Men on farms get hungry. That’s the rough shape of what I heard again and again. Beatrice Ojakangas, the James Beard Award–winning Minnesota cookbook queen, was born in 1934, on a farm in Floodwood, Minnesota. “It was what my dad would get when he went into town,” Ojakangas said of the sandwich.

I reached Ojakangas on the phone when she happened to be visiting with a group of older friends. And she called out my question to the group: When did they recall first seeing hot beef sandwiches? One man remembered his dad ordering them when he hauled pulpwood to Cloquet. Another recalled his dad ordering them in Duluth. The group burst into laughter, which broke like the sound of waves on a rocky beach through the cell-phone line.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

Ojakangas answered me in the tone of a mom trying to tell a blundering child, We’re not laughing at you, we’re laughing with you. “We all remember hot beef, hot roast beef, whatever you want to call it,” she said. “It was so popular.”

When?, I pressed: in the 1940s, 1930s, 1970s—did anyone in the group know?

“What’s the difference between the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s?” Ojakangas answered. “Those years have all blended into one big mush.”

It wasn’t hard to find the hot beef. Once you start combing local menus, you see them everywhere. The only difficult aspect of the search? When I started looking in February, I planned to visit the distant farm towns of southeastern Minnesota. But blizzard after blizzard made that impossible. (And what’s more Minnesotan than finding your hot beef blocked by the cold!) I made do with what I could get in the Twin Cities, and an hour outside it.

A few things I discovered. First, a working definition: The “hot beef” or “hot beef commercial” is not two things; they’re two names used for the exact same thing. That is, a sort of Thanksgiving-leftovers sandwich, where the main meal is beef, potatoes, and gravy.

That said, two variations exist, one made with deli-style roast beef and the other with pot roast–style beef. But either one can appear under either name. The name “hot beef commercial” is more popular in southwestern Minnesota, bleeding toward South Dakota. Mankato is roughly the epicenter of the “commercial” name. In the rest of Minnesota and in North Dakota, look for “hot beef.”

We could decide as a state to call them all “commercials,” and I’d be fine with that. It’s a nice name. If we do that, we can embrace the story I’ve most often heard about the name. The commercial, in this version, referred to commercial travelers.

As Eileen Popelka, co-owner of Bump’s Family Restaurant in Glencoe, told me, “There was a train depot here in Glencoe, and travelling salesmen came through. That’s how the story goes. If you want a fast, hearty, relatively cheap meal, you’d ask for a commercial.”

Traveling salesmen, travelling for commercial business, eat commercials.

However, Tracy Deutsch, the historian, helped me find a great number of 1950s and 1960s newspaper advertisements for beef. Here, “commercial” and “beef” appear to be inextricably intertwined—a classification akin to “prime rib.”

It turns out the beef grades we eaters all know today—categories like prime (best!) and choice (still really good!), and standard (oof, not good)—became codified only in the 1960s. In the decades before, “commercial” meant a federally guaranteed label of quality, somewhere in the upper-middle of the beef-grade spectrum. If you wanted really good—but affordable!—commercial was your grade.

(Sadly, for the purposes of this story, in the post-’60s classification system, “commercial” grade beef is among the lowest. Think elderly stud bulls.)

***

Whatever you call it, the very best beef commercial sandwich can be found at Bump’s, in Glencoe, Minnesota, an hour west of downtown Minneapolis, on Highway 212. Drive toward Minnetonka and keep going.

Order one and you get a diner plate heaped side to side with heaven can tell what. It’s a brown quivering mountain that could just as easily be bread dough, a brownie overfrosted by a child, or a platter of beer wort. Just a brownness that glistens. Explore it with a fork and you’ll uncover a whole lot of very tender pot roast, homemade and robust mashed potatoes, and some very soft white bread that has soaked up a considerable quantity of gravy. Imagine a midcentury American Yorkshire pudding.

While beef gets the marquee billing on the menu, it’s the gravy that is the beginning, middle, and end of the dish.

“There’s 12 ounces of gravy on every one,” Mike McGuire explained to me. “We have a six-ounce ladle; every sandwich gets two scoops. It’s deceptive, because it spreads out.”

McGuire, who has co-owned Bump’s since 2006, estimates the restaurant goes through 2,000 gallons of gravy a year.

Speaking of gravy, do you know what it’s like to eat 12 ounces of gravy at a sitting? I don’t, because I couldn’t finish it all. But let’s talk about eating six ounces of gravy, plus pot roast, plus mashed potatoes, plus bread. I learned something about early 20th-century life you can’t learn any other way: What was it like to haul pulpwood to Cloquet by wagon? What was it like to work in a Minneapolis sawmill? It required calories. As many as you could get on a plate.

After tasting a dozen hot beef sandwiches, I’m here to tell you the success (or lack of success) of this particular sandwich depends on the gravy. In that mode, the other best hot beef plate I tried came from the Keys Cafe and Bakery mini-chain, where they also make a from-scratch gravy. The Keys hot beef has been on the menu since founder Barbara Hunn started it in 1973, she told me. It begins with drippings from the beef (also roasted from scratch).

“The younger group doesn’t order it,” Hunn said. “They go to your trendy restaurants, your fast-food restaurants. That doesn’t really have anything to do with me. I’ve had hot beef on the menu here for 47 years. You have to have a chef or someone on staff who can do the whole thing from scratch. That’s the way we’ve always done it. After you decide to do it all from scratch, it’s easy.”

Here’s what’s terrific about the Keys hot beef: everything. Again, it’s soft pot roast–style beef, fork tender, with a good beefy gravy, real mashed potatoes, bread—and because why not?, a scoop of stuffing as well. I’d probably been to Keys 20 times and never even thought of ordering one. It’s glorious. Every forkful mellow and beefy, mellow and potatoey. The essence of country farm food. If you live in the Twin Cities and love pot roast and don’t avail yourself of one of these sandwiches, you are missing out.

It’s important, I think, that both Bump’s and Keys went into their projects as a reaction of sorts against the cooking of the time. That would have been dehydrated gravy packets and boxed-and-rehydrated potato flakes or buds—which I regret to tell you remains the norm.

Barbara Hunn opened her first Keys on Raymond Avenue, in St. Paul, determined to do things the right way, and based her whole restaurant on ideas like mashed potatoes made from potatoes. At Bump’s, McGuire and Popelka took a conscious leap into real mashed-potatoes around 1992.

“Do you remember when we did that?” Popelka asked McGuire, when we all spoke on the phone. “We used to use potato pearls. That was a huge move at the time. It was the best thing we ever did.”

Back to the beef. There are two ways of making a hot beef commercial today. One way involves roast beef, like deli meat from a slicer. The other way takes beef that has been roasted in an oven. If it sounds like those are the same thing, that’s because Americans lack an agreed-upon vocabulary to differentiate between the dozens of wildly different inputs and outputs that all mean beef-from-an-oven. (Someone get on this.)

Beatrice Ojakangas suspects that the whole concept of a Minnesota hot beef sandwich evolved out of the home-cooking staple of a big Sunday roast. Think, something like a chuck-arm roast. The next day, homemade bread would stretch the leftovers.

After tasting a dozen-odd versions, this seems right to me. Especially since the dish really depends on having drippings from the beef.

You’ll encounter places today that continue this deep history of Minnesota deli-style, house-cooked roast beef and make truly stellar roast beef sandwiches: for instance, Maverick’s Real Roast Beef, on Lexington, in Roseville; and Wally’s Roast Beef, in Bloomington. But they don’t make good gravy. Please take my advice: If you order the gravy at Maverick’s or Wally’s, you will ruin an otherwise delightful roast beef sandwich.

The one fusion example I found of deli-style-spinner-sliced roast beef with homemade gravy came from the Hi-Lo Diner in south Minneapolis. The Hi-Lo version is also the only one using house-baked bread. Although it’s a biscuit, I think that completely counts: It’s really good.

***

Where else should you go for a hot beef sandwich? Good question.

Once you start looking, they’re everywhere. At some point I became convinced there was some cut-off year—say, 1980—and every Minnesota restaurant that opened before then offered the sandwich. There it was on the menu at Milda’s (excellent), in the Bryn Mawr neighborhood of Minneapolis. At Manning’s (meh), near the U. I loved the one at Emma Krumbee’s in Belle Plaine, perhaps in part because I had a delightful conversation with a couple of elderly men in seed caps about their best caught-in-a-snowdrift story. (Answer: It took three days till the plow found her! And she popped right out the driver’s seat window, saying, I was getting worried about you.)

I learned other things I hadn’t set out to know. For instance, wherever you find hot beef, you will also find the semi-endangered species that is the cream pie with a meringue top. My whole life I have seen sour-cream-raisin pies only in old church cookbooks. Yet I encountered one in real life at Emma Krumbee’s, and it was just a surprise and a pleasure. Sort of savory, a bit tangy. British somehow?

I’ll confess, when I started this story, I thought it would be like any other food roundup. You find who makes the donuts, you taste the donuts, you judge the donuts. But finding the hot beef commercial ended up raising more questions: How did we lose it, in plain sight?

My theory, which I ran past all my food matriarchs, is this: For the first half of the 20th century, Minnesotans lived—and ate—modestly. We made our bread at home, we mashed our own potatoes, we bought the second-best beef. And, with a little flour and a lot of time, we made something wonderful for it: gravy.

The food technologies developed for World War II, like powdered gravy and dehydrated potatoes, came right for the heart of our northern food culture. We forgot what a scratch roast beef platter could be. Fast forward from 1950 to now, and you find a South that has preserved and even mythologized its country ham and red-eye gravy. While we in the North mostly lost our hot beef.

But we didn’t entirely lose it. My plea? Take the same journey I did, in miniature. Make this the year you start seeing hot beef. Go to Keys, visit Milda’s, road trip to Bump’s. While you’re at it, why not hit our heritage purist roast beef spots too: Try Wally’s, try Maverick’s.

When people ask you what’s the Minneapolis food, have a second answer after the Juicy Lucy. Our food is hot beef. Your out-of-town friends will look at you to see if you’re joking. Keep a straight face. Tell them: Imagine a Thanksgiving- leftovers sandwich, but it’s beef. For a hundred years it was the meal country folk ate when they came to town.

Tell them: There’s almost nowhere left that has a good one. But you can still find it—and I know where. 

The Brown-Plate Special

What does it take to make Minnesota’s greatest sandwich?

  1. Bake a loaf of bread: the soft, fancy, weekend-sandwich kind. White, brioche, sourdough? Your call.
  2. Season and roast a giant hunk of beef. Like a five- or ten-pound boneless beef rib roast. Gather the drippings.
  3. Make a great deal of real gravy from your beef drippings. Use homemade roast-bone-broth if you’ve got it.
  4. Make mashed potatoes, any variety, from scratch. Don’t skimp on the butter.
  5. Enjoy a nice Sunday dinner, with all of the above.
  6. Wake up on Monday. Finally, it’s sandwich day! Take out your leftovers and make the best sandwich in the world! Bread goes on the bottom, then mashed potatoes, then beef, then another slice of bread up top. Finally, dump enough gravy over the plate to get gravy in every bite. That’s living! 

Here Comes Your Hot Beef

Whether you call the sandwich “hot beef” or a “hot beef commercial,” Minnesota serves up plenty of them. The best this critic tasted?

Bump’s Family Restaurant 

Head into farm country for the best of the best: 12 ounces of gravy on pot roast–soft beef. Plus real potatoes. Please note, Eileen Popelka’s spring rhubarb torte is the talk of Glencoe. Glencoe, 320-864-6038, bumpsrestaurant.com

Keys Cafe

All seven metro Twin Cities locations of Keys Cafe serve founder Barbara Hunn’s original comfort-food version. That’s the dish with the good savory gravy and a scoop of Thanksgiving stuffing, just for good luck. If you want a picture with Barbara herself, try the Raymond location, and don’t skip the pie case. multiple locations, keyscafe.com

Milda’s Cafe 

Every day, a cook at Milda’s puts a 30-pound roast in the oven, then makes scratch gravy for the most traditional and midcentury authentic hot beef in the Cities. The smart timing is to visit on a Monday, Wednesday, or Friday, when Milda’s offers homemade Iron Range pasties (frozen) to take home—they’re fantastic. 1720 Glenwood Ave., Mpls., 612-377-9460

Emma Krumbee’s 

Join the seed-cap crew at the counter at Emma Krumbee’s for a rib-sticking commercial and a jaunt down memory lane. (They can be memories you might not have, but want to acquire before they disappear.) Please note, the pie case is a work of art. And the teal-and-mahogany 1970s décor makes it the number-one place you should take Quentin Tarantino if he ever comes scouting for movie locations. Belle Plaine, 952-873-4334, emmakrumbees.com/emma-krumbees-belle-plaine

Hi-Lo Diner 

There are two versions of commercials alive in Minnesota today: the pot roast version (described above), and the deli roast beef–style, like the one at Hi-Lo. In this second category, Hi-Lo’s reigns supreme. Delicious griddled cheddar biscuits make up the bottom layer. Real mashed potatoes and decent gravy fill out the rest. The beef itself gives you that sense of having really eaten something substantial—but still leaves room for some of the state’s best malts. 4020 E. Lake St., Mpls., 612-353-6568, hi-lo-diner.com