Seattle’s Chicago-Approved ‘The Bear’ Italian Beef Sandwich

It looks as if half my social media is presently dedicated to the brand new FX and Hulu present The Bear—parsing the way it depicts the customarily poisonous, habitually intense camaraderie of life in a restaurant kitchen. Or thirsting over Jeremy Allen White, who performs the generally poisonous, habitually intense protagonist chef Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto.

I humbly submit there’s one other luminous beef scenario on this present that deserves dialogue. Specifically the Italian beef sandwiches that energy these plotlines. Juicy piles of thin-shaved roast beef, slid au jus right into a french roll and topped with giardiniera comprise a Chicago meals icon, proper up there with deep-dish pizza, jibaritos, and scorching canine dragged via the backyard.

There’s precisely one place in Seattle that makes a correct model. And it’s…not open fairly but.

We largely know West of Chicago Pizza Firm for its deep-dish pies, out there just for pickup from proprietor Shawn Millard’s commissary kitchen in Delridge. Millard blended issues up with the occasional Italian beef sandwich popup; tickets at all times offered out with ferocity. It’s the one Italian beef my Chicago-born husband has discovered that stands as much as his recollections of 312 staples like Mr. Beef (the inspiration for The Bear).

Millard not too long ago closed his takeout kitchen to open a correct restaurant within the Junction that can serve his Italian beef on the common. The opening stays in limbo, due to a water heater concern. However inside the subsequent week or two, Millard hopes he can lastly present us with a dependable font of beef sandwiches.

West of Chicago does it proper. Millard begins with backside spherical “the most affordable reduce there may be.” That is the fashionable day, Windy Metropolis model of Italy’s cucina povera in spite of everything, devised to feed blue-collar staff. He stabs it stuffed with garlic, rubs it down along with his personal spice combine, oils it up like a wrestler, and roasts it up. The meat chills for a minimum of eight hours afterward—to relaxation and get these juices distributed. It’s essential for logistical causes too, says Millard. “You possibly can’t make it contemporary out of the oven and assume you’re going to get that good paper-thin slice.”

His relationship to this backside spherical is often three days in by the point Millard slices his beef tremendous skinny. In the meantime the drippings from that pan stuffed with spicy, oiled-up beef bits has been Cinderella’d into au jus. He makes use of a pasta basket to drop that chilly beef into its scorching depths to heat it up simply earlier than serving. Like several correct purveyor of Italian beef, Millard serves his sandwiches dry (meat will get extracted from the jus with tongs), moist ( little bit of juice nonetheless shrouds the meat if you stuff it within the sandwich roll), or dipped (Chicago doesn’t fiddle).

Sandwiches come candy—i.e., with sauteed inexperienced peppers—or scorching, which suggests Millard breaks out the identical Marconi model scorching giardiniera you discover throughout Chicagoland. He additionally orders the traditional Turano rolls out of Illinois, the one ones purists contemplate sufficiently sturdy.

Millard dubbed his sandwich the Elwood, as a result of Chicago has iconic cultural figures scattered round its sidewalks the best way now we have discarded electrical scooters. When West of Chicago lastly opens, he’ll solely provide it for dine-in, since french rolls bearing the load of beef doused in meat juice don’t precisely journey effectively.

Millard has stopped carrying his West of Chicago T-shirt across the neighborhood, since he will get inundated with questions on when his restaurant will open. However he hasn’t been utilizing his involuntary downtime to binge The Bear.

“I’ve been retaining myself from watching it,” he says. The portrayal of kitchen life as a grease-spattered psychological and emotional battlefield hits just a little too shut. “I’ve labored in some locations which have left me with some critical PTSD.”

Millard has a really completely different vitality in thoughts for his new kitchen, which is able to hopefully open quickly. Preserve tabs on West of Chicago’s Instagram for updates.