Minnesota comfort-food classic, hot beef commercial, is the 'most delicious thing you can eat'
The nightclub owner, who lives in St. Paul, fondly recalls savoring the beef, mashed potato and gravy sandwiches at Charlie's Café in Freeport, while on trips to the family's North Woods cabin with his grandfather.
Hot beef commercial is a casual-dining classic common in the pubs, sports bars and family restaurants of Minnesota.
It's found straight west across Interstate 90 all the way to the Black Hills of South Dakota.
Hot beef commercial is essentially chopped or shredded beef served on slices of good ol' white bread with mashed potatoes — then doused with a generous pool of thick beef gravy.
Hardly haute cuisine.
"But it don't get much better," added Urban, owner of Wild Greg's Saloons in Florida and Texas.
He closed his original Minneapolis location amid the fallout from Black Lives Matter riots and COVID-19 restrictions .
The culinary idiom hot beef commercial has many origin stories.
"Traveling salesmen, traveling for commercial business, eat commercials," food writer Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl reported in a 2019 hot beef commercial treatise for Mpls.St.Paul Magazine.
That account was relayed to her by the owner of hot beef commercial hot spot Bump's Family Restaurant in Glencoe.
Ashley Revering, the manager of Charlie's Café, believes the name grew out of a popular local commercial jingle that promoted hot beef sandwiches decades ago.
Any advertising is gone, but hot beef commercial remains the most popular item at Charlie's Café, the manager said.
The most likely origin story is that the hearty comfort-food sandwiches were traditionally made with low-quality or "commercial" grade beef.
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Braised slow and low like a pot roast and doused in gravy, the tougher-cut meat was rendered tender and delicious.
Its traditional popularity in Minnesota appears to trace its roots to the state's hearty lumberjack and farming legacy.
"Men on farms get hungry. That's the rough shape of what I heard again and again," wrote Grumdahl.
Some fear now that the hot beef commercial tradition is waning as Minnesotans, and humans in general, lose connection with harder lives that require heartier food.
"For the first half of the 20th century, Minnesotans lived – and ate – modestly," wrote Grumdahl.
"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."
