Best Roast Beef Debris Po Boy in New Orleans
The 23 po-boys I ended up writing about in my quest for the best roast beef po-boy came from restaurants that all together have been open in the neighborhood of 900 years. That longevity alone underscores something I didn't fully understand before my quest began: The roast beef po-boy is not an odd duck in our seafood-mad corner of the world but a dish close to the heart of the region's culinary identity.
The 10 listed below are my favorites and yours to explore (and debate).
The Winner:
R & O's
216 Old Hammond Highway, Metairie | 504.831.1248
Once upon a time -- let's say the fall of 2003 -- I found myself alone with an R & O's roast beef po-boy thinking, "I cannot imagine anything I would rather be doing right now than eating this sandwich."
The hyperbole wasn't something I could adequately defend once the gravy-induced stupor had faded, but I truly believed I was in a state of unsurpassable ecstasy during the length of time it took me to eat that po-boy. And it is the memory of that moment that compelled me, so many years later, to see if I could find a roast beef po-boy to rival R & O's.
More po-boys than I expected to discover forced me to question my devotion. Was I blinded by irrational lust? Subconsciously fearful that stumbling upon greener pastures would send me into a spiral of regret at having wasted so many years settling for less?
With more than four months of research behind me, I feel confident saying the answer is no. Like a burgeoning wine connoisseur whose sampling of the world's grapes ultimately intensifies her desire to drink more Romanee-Conti, I keep returning to R & O's.
If we can agree that gravy is not a substance separate from beef, but a liquid expression of why we so covet the flesh of the cow, we can then argue that R & O's roast beef po-boy is not just filled with beef; it's painted with it. You can see it staining the edges of the bread, both halves of which are introduced to beef before being placed in the oven.
The top half gets dipped in gravy, the bottom half layered with gravy-soaked beef that comes as close in flavor to true debris as any I've tried. The dry heat does something for the seeded bread -- call it Crisping for Battle -- but even more for the beef. It is as if the meat has been plugged into Spinal Tap's amplifier, turning the volume on its beefiness up to 11.
It is impossible to think of anything while eating R & O's roast beef po-boy other than the pleasure of eating. For a devoted carnivore, the experience reaffirms carnivorousness as an energy that borders on sexual. Not bad coming from a place opened by a family of fishers.
If everyone could eat something that had this effect on their minds and bodies every single day, the sum total of human unhappiness would reach historic lows. Too bad there is only one R & O's.
The rest of the Top 10 (in alphabetical order)
Bear's
128 West 21st Ave., Covington | 985.892.2373
1809 N. Causeway Blvd., Mandeville | 985.674.9090
550 Gause Blvd., Slidell | 985.201.8905
3206 Metairie Road, Metairie | 504.833.9226
The "original" Bear's in Covington opened in 1990, but according to its owner, Josh Watson, the basis for its roast beef recipe -- as well as the basis for the recipes at the other three Bear's locations owned by Watson's brother Matt -- dates back to the late 1950s, when Watson's grandparents and parents ran a restaurant called the White House at the corner Hammond Highway and Chickasaw Avenue in Bucktown.
There are some subtle differences between the roast beef po-boys at the Bear's at Gennaro's in Metairie and the flagship Bear's po-boy shop in Covington, the two I sampled for the purposes of this project. The Metairie restaurant uses Leidenheimer bread, for instance, where Covington uses a north shore baker called Wise Guy. Chris Canfill, general manager of Bear's at Gennaro's, also said something Josh Watson did not: "We put more mayonnaise on our po-boys than a normal human being would."
But the sandwiches' strengths are their similarities. Both locations roast their own beef, which they chill before slicing against the grain. At first, neither po-boy looks terribly dependent on gravy. The folds of the meat are vivid to the eye, not distant curls clouded by sauce.
But a different story emerges after you grip the toasted bread, putting pressure on the beef and releasing the gravy that has been absorbed by the meat during its soak in the gravy pot. The sensation is as satisfying as a fried oyster exploding on the tongue.
Chateau Orleans Po-Boys
2324 Barataria Blvd., Marrero, 504.347.1177
Turns out "like real homemade" isn't a meaningless figure of speech, at least not in reference to the roast beef po-boys at Chateau Orleans.
Bonnie Turner opened the restaurant in a Marrero strip mall in 2008. She's partnered with her husband Adam, who emptied out a retirement savings account to get the place off the ground, and her mother, Bonnie Turner, neither of whom had prior restaurant experience.
"As far as food and cooking, it's just all my mom's recipes, me and my mom's," explained Turner, a mother of six whose oldest is 8 years-old. For the roast beef, she stuffs an inside beef round "with the garlic and season it up, cook it slow." When it's done, "we let it sit for a while with the aluminum foil on top of it. That's really important."
So is that seasoning, which permeates the shredded beef and the gravy clinging to it. The bread comes from Hi-Do, a West Bank bakery that deserves more attention. Its toasted skin is a shade stronger than the norm, cracking like the surface of hot creme brulee, but its crumb is soft and absorbent.
Chalk one up for Marrero -- and mama's cooking.
Johnny's Po-Boys
511 St. Louis St., New Orleans, 504.524.8129
Of the many camps that form the diverse Nation of Roast Beef Po-boy Connoisseurs, or NRBPC, no two would appear to be more at odds than the toasted bread adherents and those who demand their bread as God/Leidenheimer intended/delivered it.
In a nutshell, toasted bread fans like a sandwich that stands a chance of holding its shape to the last bite. For untoasted fans, sloppiness is pretty much the point of a roast beef po-boy.
All of which brings us to Johnny's Po-Boys, the raucous, 60-some year-old breakfast-and-lunch hall. If there's a better po-boy shop in the French Quarter, I haven't been to it.
Johnny's roast beef po-boys are, according to general manager (and grandson-in-law of founder Johnny De Grusha) Mike Cancienne, built from meat slow-boiled with garlic, black pepper, onions, bell pepper and celery, "kind of like you do with your crawfish or your crabs, so it takes on all that flavor."
After it's done, the beef is left to soak in a pot of gravy in the open kitchen behind the counter, waiting to be plucked by tongs. It's delicious.
Johnny's kitchen staff will griddle-toast the Leidenheimer bread for your roast beef po-boy if you ask, but people who don't specify receive their sandwich on untoasted loaves, which is how I tried mine. Shake your head no when asked whether your order is to go. It means your sandwich will be served on a plate, not steaming inside a cocoon of butcher paper.
The first half is a reminder that fresh po-boy bread can be crisp-skinned and sturdy, even untoasted. Because it has had longer to soak up the gravy, the second half comes closer to messiness-is-next-to-Godliness camp's ideal. The sum total is the best of both worlds, Switzerland in the shape-shifting form of a roast beef po-boy, a sandwich two opposing camps in the NRBPC. should be able to agree on.
Mahony's Po-Boy Shop
3454 Magazine St., New Orleans, 504.899.3374
Mahony's was founded on the conviction that po-boys are a worthy obsession of a chef trained to perform on a more elegant stage, as owner Ben Wicks is, and the roast beef makes it difficult to argue he's wrong. It's a great sandwich that doesn't hit you over the head with its fine dining pedigree.
Wicks cooks Angus beef as a pot roast, braising it in red wine with vegetables and herbs. The resulting meat is so tender it could probably be consumed with a straw. It also doesn't suffer the curse of underseasoning that requires too many roast beef po-boys to be brought to life with hot sauce. Served between halves of toasted, sesame-freckled Leidenheimer bread, mine tasted more than a little like beef bourguignon, the wine imparting an unmistakable tang.
It's messy not because the bread turns to mush but because the tender pulls of meat struggle to find traction, slipping out the back end and onto the butcher paper, waiting to be scooped up between thumb and Zapp's potato chip.
Parasol's
2533 Constance St., New Orleans, 504.302.1543
John and Thea Hogan purchased Parasol's from its previous owners in 2010. The business had been operating since 1952 in a corner bar space no one will ever confuse for a yoga studio. It's a dive bar that owes its iconicity to an off-the-hook St. Patrick's Day street party and to a roast beef po-boy that for many New Orleanians is the reason they love roast beef po-boys.
The sandwich remains, in many ways, a model of the form -- and arguably as good as it has ever been. The fall-apart beef comes in a juicy, medium-thick layer between toasted halves of bread. A light painting of garlic butter on the bread signals the signature touch of the Hogan era, one that amplifies the beef's flavor without overwhelming it.
There is considerable debate over who serves the best roast beef po-boy in the Irish Channel. Parasol's comes out on top by living up to its legend.
Rocky & Carlo's
613 W. St. Bernard Highway, Chalmette, 504.279.8323
The culinary world holds several examples of items that seem to taste more emphatically of the primary ingredient they are derived from than the ingredient itself. Just think about how mango sorbet intensifies its fruit's intensity, or the way a bouillabaisse's broth can taste twice as much like seafood as anything this side of an anchovy.
Beef gravy belongs on this list, at least when it's made as it is at Rocky & Carlo's.
According to general manager Tommy Tommaseo, son of the restaurant's late co-founder Rocky Tommaseo, the kitchen goes through 320 pounds of roast beef a week. The gravy that comes out of all that beef roasting is thick in consistency, dark in color and vivid in flavor, like a consomme bulked up for winter.
It brings a silken texture to the medium-thick sliced roast beef on Rocky's po-boys, which are served on bread -- generally toasted during humid summers and by request in the fall and winter -- from Alois J. Binder Bakery.
It's a measure of the power of the gravy's intense beef flavor that Rocky's customers crave it even when they're not ordering beef. Tommaseo said people request it on top of fried shrimp and oysters, the veal cutlet, stuffed bell peppers and, perhaps most famously, the house's popular macaroni and cheese.
"We're constantly putting brown gravy on hamburger steaks," he added. "When we do that, we're in the habit of putting it on the macaroni and cheese, too, even when they don't ask. But no one has ever sent it back."
St. Rose Tavern
11760 River Road, St. Rose, 504.469.8864
Current owner Pat Elfer said she started working at St. Rose Tavern in 1953, soon after she was born and three years after her parents converted a 1920s-era rural hotel into a simple restaurant and tavern.
The roast beef recipe is her mother's. She cooks the bottom round in a roasting pan with enough liquid to create a broth.
It is, technically speaking, sliced, but the end result is a far cry from the neatly layered slices found at places like Bear's and Domilise's, where the beef is closer to something you might find in a deli.
Elfer uses a 16-inch knife -- "When you have a real enemy, it's the one you show them," she said -- to cut St. Rose's roast, but the beef has been cooked so tender by the time it meets the blade she could easily get the job done using the knife's dull side.
The beef is just a few shades firmer than debris by the time it lands on the soft center of a lightly toasted Leidenheimer loaf. The liquid that drips out the sides is as much au jus as gravy; I would not cry foul if a person were to spoon this roundly-seasoned beef over pappardelle and call it ragu.
St. Rose's roast beef po-boy raises the question as to whether a sandwich so widely available in New Orleans can ever be worth a trip out of town. In the case of this sandwich, served in this singular, levee-side setting, the answer is yes.
Sammy's Food Service & Deli
3000 Elysian Fields Ave., New Orleans, 504.947.0675
Sammy Schloegel, who runs Sammy's with his wife, Gina, is a former butcher, which goes some way toward explaining the quality of Sammy's hand-cut meats and homemade sausage.
The po-boy's beef, cut just shy of being thick enough to serve on its own with mashed potatoes, curl out the edges of lightly toasted Leidenheimer bread. The meat's fat is carefully trimmed, but not before it has enriched the meat with its juices.
I shared mine with a friend who'd actually never eaten a roast beef po-boy before. He noted something I love -- "It's got just the right amount of salt" -- as he did what humans are apparently programmed to do after taking their first few bites of a roast beef po-boy: He rotated the sandwich to more closely observe the end he had yet to corrupt with his teeth, pondering the passage of the now mayonnaise-streaked gravy and, I presume, the possibility of eating the sandwich from both sides, ending up essentially in the middle.
I was reminded of the large impact of the tiniest touch: sliced kosher dills, thicker, juicier and fruitier than the flabby pickle chips that commonly find their way into po-boys. By the time a sliver of garlic announced its presence in the last bites of my sandwich's first half, our conversation had been largely reduced to guttural expressions of satisfaction.
Southern Po-Boys
720 Claiborne Dr., Jefferson, 504.835.3035
Southern Po-Boys is owned by the Trans, a family of Vietnamese descent who also operates Burger Orleans in Slidell. If the restaurant's roast beef po-boy offers insights into a Vietnamese-American po-boy tradition, it does so in a roundabout way.
Unlike what is found at, say, Tamarind, the upscale French-Vietnamese restaurant that serves a banh mi filled with short ribs braised in red wine and five spice powder, Southern's roast beef bears no obvious Asian influence.
Steven Tran said he developed his recipe pretty much on his own, taking bits of what he learned from an African-American chef who'd cooked at the decades-old restaurant before the Tran family bought it in 2011.
"She just said, 'Put some spices in there and throw it in the oven,'" is how the 24-year-old explained the guidance he received. "I make my own gravy with a roux from the roast beef drippings."
Tran's roast beef po-boy is not unusual, just meat cut against the grain and folded onto the sandwich with thick gravy clinging to it. The lightly toasted bread comes from Dong Phuong, the eastern New Orleans bakery whose bread is the Vietnamese answer to Leidenheimer.
Southern's roast beef is only available on a bun or a long 12-inch loaf, which Tran urges customers to order with words destined for a bumper sticker: "Who knows? You might eat the whole thing."
I did.
Brett Anderson can be reached at banderson@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3353. Follow him at twitter.com/BrettAndersonTP.
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Source: https://www.nola.com/entertainment_life/eat-drink/article_01e03075-96d8-504a-87bc-a983e7f671ea.html
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