The pennant flags flap in the furnace-hot wind through the empty Lowe’s parking lot in Richardson. It’s lunchtime, and TJ’s Dawg House truck has its serving window propped open and grill hissing. The parking lot’s enormous, and the truck is a lipstick red and cartoon sun yellow rectangle in the center of the vast concrete prairie like a LEGO stuck in the middle of a gray carpet. It’s technicolor in the middle of a black and white movie. Thomas Chelak is perched in the window.
“You’re not in electrical are you?” he asks, and I shake my head because my skills are best used to demolish a gravy-soaked sandwich. “Ah, no worries, I thought I recognized you,” he laughs. “What can I get you?”
Always order an Italian beef at TJ’s Dawg House. Hot dogs are buttery and great, but the gravy bathed-Italian beef is something louder. It’s as old school as a Foghat album. The gravy washes the bread, the giardiniera pops and shimmies, and the beef, shaved into panes, melts.
Good Italian beef sandwiches have never really been our thing in Dallas. Chicago-style hot dog joints, with Italian beef sandwiches on the menu, land and depart as quickly as Southwest planes in our city. But there’s recent interest as more people watch The Bear on Hulu. The hit show follows a young, Noma-trained chef as he takes the wheel of his brother’s Italian beef joint in the heart of Chicago.
Jimmy’s Food Store has had old-school Italian beef on its menu for years, sporting the classic components of giardiniera (sport peppers, pickled crunchy veggies) on sheer-sliced Vienna Beef doused in salty gravy. During the pandemic, they offered Italian beef kits for takeaway. Cheese? Jimmy’s blankets their roll with sharp provolone. It magmas to the bread under the wash of gravy. It’s classic Chicago street food in a Dallas Italian market that will only set you back $10. For a couple more dollars, you can have them double the amount of beef.
More recently, some real-deal Chicago sandwiches — the kind with scratch gravy — have found their way to Dallas. Portillo’s Beef Bus, a food truck version of the actually-good, Chicago-born chain Portillo’s, is on its last leg of a Dallas trip. You can find the bus in the Colony through July 22, and it ends its tour in Denton at the great Harvest House bar. The Beef Bus portends the grand opening of a brick-and-mortar Portillo’s hot dog shop in the city limits (and more).
At Easy Slider on Main Street, the special of the month is literally named The Bear. Owners Caroline Perini and Miley Holmes’ version of the classic sub means beef braised for eight hours, floating with plenty of Italian seasonings and pepperoncini peppers, carrots, and celery. They make sure the sandwich is “wet,” swept through gravy, before it reaches your hands.
Grab this one from their Deep Ellum spot or their roving food trucks soon —it’s the special as long as it’s July here in Dallas. Fair warning, Easy Slider has one amendment to the classic ingredients:
“We do a not-so-traditional horseradish cream sauce because we love it and we’re Texan,” Perini says.
A true blue, Chicago-raised Italian beef can also be found at New York Sub. Chef Andrew Kelley raised the sub shop from the grave a handful of years ago and has since electrified the menu with knockout brisket pastrami and an Italian beef that will drop you into downtown Chicago.
Kelley’s gravy is dreamy. He chops whole florets of garlic in half and drops them it in a simmering mirepoix with rosemary and thyme. It roils low and slow with beef stock. There’s a heap of spicy, pickled peppers, and the bread softens and fades into the gravy. There are few that are comparable in Dallas.
