Top Poor Boys: Roast Beef

Eleven years ago, when I moved to New Orleans from a Western resort town where hummus on whole-grain bagels was a lunch standard, poor boys were exotica. Trying them in every variety helped me to overcome a lifelong fear of mayonnaise, a prejudice against weightless white bread and the notion that a sandwich is merely something to tide you over between breakfast and dinner. Back then, a poor boy at lunch was enjoyable but often crippling, so filling that it destroyed any possibility of eating dinner. But over time the poor boy became comfort food, a sandwich to turn to for both physical sustenance and emotional connection to place.

Who, for example, doesn’t remember eating her first post-Hurricane Katrina poor boy? (Mine was a grilled shrimp at Guy’s Po-Boys). The path from Louis Armstrong International Airport to Parkway Bakery and Tavern (and R&O’s and Parran’s and Galley Seafood) is well-worn – unpacking can wait. And what could better affirm a gal’s affection for this city than finding herself in the company of eight strangers – all women – on a recent Wednesday two minutes before opening time waiting to rush the doors at Mahony’s Po-Boy Shop? The salads at Mahony’s are very good, but every last one of us ordered a poor boy.

I had a roast beef, dressed, that day. We decided to focus on roast beef poor boys in this article because roast beef seems to be the quiet but unofficially official poor boy of New Orleans, the poor boy of maximum opinion and controversy and the poor boy that old-timer New Orleanians miss most when they wax poetic about the poor boys of yore (see: “Ain’t Dere No More” sidebar). Perhaps natives have a genetically transferred appreciation for the dependability of roast beef, which would have been more consistently available than seafood back before refrigeration and deep freezers. Or, perhaps it’s the sloppy, multiple-napkin, love-me-or-leave-me attitude of the city’s most talked-about roast beef poor boys that engenders such reverence.   

Whatever the reason for their prominence, roast beef poor boys existed in New Orleans back when French bread sandwiches were still called “loaves.” The sandwich earned its current name at Martin Brothers’ Coffee Stand & Restaurant, which opened in the French Market in 1922 and later moved to the corner of St. Claude Avenue and Touro Street. The brothers Bennie and Clovis Martin, Acadiana natives, had worked as union streetcar conductors prior to becoming restaurateurs, and they sided strongly with New Orleans streetcar operators during the railway workers’ strike of ’29. In a letter dated Aug. 6 of that year, the brothers wrote to the striking carmen of Division 194, offering free meals to any of them who passed by their French Market restaurant. “We are with you ’til h– –l freezes, and when it does, we will furnish blankets to keep you warm,” they wrote.

According to Michael Mizell-Nelson, an associate professor at the University of New Orleans who wrote a chapter about New Orleans French bread for the book New Orleans Cuisine: Fourteen Signature Dishes and Their Histories, the Martins supplied strikers with sandwiches for several months at least. New Orleanians began calling the strikers – and they began calling themselves – “poor boys,” not entirely without irony. The term eventually became attached to the sandwiches that the “poor boys” ate without charge. Even paying customers at Martin Brothers in the 1930s spent just 10 cents for a 15-inch sandwich, and 15 cents for a 20-inch half-loaf. Lettuce and tomato sandwiches were free for everyone.

Around this period, writes Mizell-Nelson, “The restaurant purchased 12 to 22 head of cattle at a time and employed their own butcher to prepare the meat.” Certainly not all that beef became hamburger steak. It is safe to assume that at the very least the roast beef gravy ladle at Martin Brothers’ passed over the strikers’ poor boy sandwiches.
Local food radio personality and author Tom Fitzmorris, a native New Orleanian, is adamant about the spelling of “poor boy.” That is how Bennie and Clovis spelled it, he says. So there. The publisher of this magazine agrees and has argued the matter more than once in these pages (see Inside, pg. 6). Other local publications have adapted the in-print spelling to reflect a modernized, conjunct – some may call it sloppy – pronunciation of the sandwich’s name: “po-boy.” That I feel obligated to devote a paragraph to the topic of how the sandwich is spelled and why speaks, I think, to the intensity of emotion with which New Orleanians regard the poor boy. If the Rio Grande Gorge were filled with gravy, that still wouldn’t compete with how deep the story of New Orleanians and their poor boys runs. Which is why this Top 10 roast beef poor boys list is not meant to end the dialogue or stem any controversy, but rather fan the passions of the roast beef enthusiasts among us.

It was not my intention at the start of this project to remain ecumenical – honest evaluation was the goal – but this list does contain representatives from all three roast beef styles most commonly found in poor boys. There is the sliced beef variety, for which the meat is sliced either from a roast prepared in-house or from a processed deli-type loaf; the pot-roast variety, wherefore the meat is pulled from a roast and either laid upon the bread in large hunks or chopped; and the debris variety, which can be prepared in a couple of ways (roasted, boiled) and results in moist, shredded meat that recalls what happens when you put a roast in a slow cooker and forget about it for 10 hours. (Technically, debris is bits of meat and char that fall from a roast during cooking and mingle with the pan drippings, essentially creating a meaty gravy. But few poor boy shops produce enough debris in exactly this way to meet the demand for debris sandwiches. So cooks create alternative pathways to a debris-type poor boy experience.)

While I set out to compile a Top 10 list without ranking, one roast beef poor boy did rise to the top like yeasted dough in a proof box. The remaining nine are listed in alphabetical order by restaurant name.

My devotion to Mahony’s roast beef blossomed a couple of years ago during pregnancy. When nothing else tasted right, or even began to address my bottomless hunger, a large Mahony’s roast beef and gravy, dressed, extra pickles, with a side of fries, did me right every time. As I also took a new liking to processed cheese and the strangely doughnut-smelling seasoned fries at Rally’s during those nine months, my evaluation of Mahony’s roast beef needed to be tested. Which is why I put Mahony’s at the tail-end of my roast beef poor boy circuit, at which point I was, honestly, ready to eat some shrimp. But there it was, my old friend, when I unrolled the white paper that envelopes even the poor boys intended to be eaten within the restaurant. And I was ready for it.

I had snapped a quick photo of every previous poor boy I had tasted on the circuit, but the thought never occurred to me at Mahony’s. I needed to eat this one now. It contained large, meaty lobes of beef that appeared to have been tenderly tugged from a roast, invisible layers of nearly liquid fat melting into the meat as I chewed. There was, as usual, an herbaceousness that evoked bay and thyme. The gravy and meat were one, the former clinging to the latter as if magnetized, beefy and thick but not at all suggestive of flour or cornstarch. The sesame bread from Leidenheimer Baking Co. was just slightly toasted, enough to enable eating the entire sandwich as a sandwich, but not so sturdily that I felt robbed of the messiness that roast beef poor boy lovers brag about enduring as if they’ve summitted Kilimanjaro. (You may also order poor boys at Mahony’s with unseeded bread instead.)

This is not the most traditional preparation of roast beef in New Orleans. Mahony’s chef-owner, Benjamin Wicks, is a native New Orleanian, and he loosely modeled his restaurant after Norby’s, the neighborhood poor boy restaurant nearest to his childhood home in Uptown that once operated where Patois is now. But he learned his craft in culinary school and prepares his roast beef by braising it in a traditional French style – with a mire poix of seasoning vegetables, fresh herbs and red wine. Wicks estimates that 25 percent of his native New Orleanian customers are partial to the more common sliced version of the sandwich and turn their noses up at his roast beef. He says he feeds those customers Dirty Fries, smothered in gravy and cheese, to keep them happy.

The texture of the roast beef at R&O’s is so unique that I asked manager Ulysses John (“U.J.”) Mollere for a precise description of its preparation. I wish I could relate what he told me. The steps were so numerous and complex – he used words like “boil,” “steak,” “sliver,” “bamboo,” “slicer” – that I decided to just go with the result: “debris.” At R&O’s, debris looks like chips of beef suspended in a substantial, peppery, satin-finished gravy. The kitchen’s method of toasting its seeded Leidenheimer bread is just as labor-intensive as its roast beef preparation. Cooks dip the top half of the bread in gravy and apply beef and gravy to the bottom half; they slide both halves into a convection oven, open-face, so that all surfaces toast. As at Parasol’s, you may not get the satisfaction that wrangling with a messy roast beef poor boy can bring, but instead you get to enjoy eating your sandwich.

METHODOLOGY
If a restaurant, corner store or sandwich shop serves a poor boy in New Orleans, chances are red-hot that a traditional roast beef version is at the top of the list (Ye Olde College Inn and Stanley were two exceptions I encountered during this research). It would, therefore, be impossible for one person to taste every roast beef poor boy in the city in the span of a few months and also, well, live. For this article, I ate 30 roast beef poor boys.
For the sake of fairness – and also because I tend to prefer them this way – I ordered each roast beef poor boy “dressed.” With just a few minor differences, this resulted time and again in a sandwich lavished with mayonnaise and garnished with shredded lettuce, tomato slices and pickle chips.
Early in my research a friend commented that roast beef poor boys always benefit from a few dashes of hot sauce, and I learned to agree with him. The vinegar component of hot sauce adds zing, a dimension of brightness, to what is by nature a fairly dark and one-dimensional sandwich. Pickles do the same while also providing crunch.
Two other friends recommended utterly unorthodox additions that tasted good enough to mention here. One adds Zapp’s Creole Tomato potato chips to his favorite roast beef poor boy (from R&O’s). Another loads hers at Mahony’s with wispy onion rings.

Mahony’s Po-Boy Shop
3454 Magazine St., 899-3374

 

Freret St. Po-Boys & Donut Shop
4701 Freret St., 872-9676
Smack at the center of Freret Street’s restaurant-led revitalization, cooks at this corner shop put out some beautiful poor boys (and, perhaps for another article, fried chicken). I carried one home and it arrived intact, its bread not too soggy, its lettuce maintaining its crunch and its tomatoes somehow still cool. The gravy, applied with moderation, is ever-so-slightly redolent of garlic, and the beef ranges between the pot roast and the debris styles. It has the structural integrity of the former but is shredded like the latter. “Well-seasoned” ought to go without saying in discussions of all roast beef poor boys, but it doesn’t. This one is a shining star in that regard.

Joe Sepie’s
4402 Jefferson Highway, 324-5613
When I asked Joe Sepie’s owner, Pete Theriot, the secret to his roast beef, he claimed to have none. “It’s just cooked from scratch,” he said. “The little things make a difference.” Little things like boiling cubed eye of round in beef stock on the stovetop instead of roasting it because he thinks that method minimizes fat.

And like ordering pistolettes from Leidenheimer instead of the more commonly used 32-inch loaves because he thinks they have a thinner crust. And like sending gravy on the side with take-out orders so that the bread doesn’t disintegrate before you get it home. The beef itself is shredded, “debris-style,” and pleasantly peppery.

Liuzza’s Bar & Restaurant
3636 Bienville St., 482-9120
I had had a particularly bland run of roast beef eating, and then along came Liuzza’s, a glimmer of hope in a sea of gray. The beef was pot-roast style, though tending strongly toward debris and even rosy in spots. Not rosy as in rare, but rosy as in cooked-just-enough. Both beef and gravy had full, round, pepper-spiked flavor. Chef Annea Honore told me that she makes her gravy from the roast’s natural juices and pan drippings, which she cooks down for two hours with beef stock, seasoning vegetables and dried herbs. It is a medium-thick, beefy gravy and the same one used to moisten Liuzza’s excellent fried potato poor boy. I particularly appreciated the abundance of pickles served on the side of both poor boy varieties.
 

Munch Factory
5339 Franklin Ave., 324-5372
Chef Jordan Ruiz and his wife Alexis opened Munch Factory in Gentilly in April. It seems like something of a risky venture as you drive through blocks still struggling to regain their pre-Katrina verve, but as you enter a dining room filled with customers digging into ribeye steaks and shrimp and grits, you realize that this was just the place the neighborhood must have been craving. The sandwich selection is small but serious, including a shredded-style roast beef that the menu describes as “shaved” and Alexis describes as just like her mother-in-law used to make. The meat gets most of its flavor and moisture from a jus-like gravy that bordered on too salty the day I tried it but nevertheless edged out competitors. The couple uses bread from Cartozzo’s Bakery, which is softer than traditional New Orleans French bread.

R&O’s
3636 Bienville St., 482-9120
Eleven years ago, when I moved to New Orleans from a Western resort town where hummus on whole-grain bagels was a lunch standard, poor boys were exotica. Trying them in every variety helped me to overcome a lifelong fear of mayonnaise, a prejudice against weightless white bread and the notion that a sandwich is merely something to tide you over between breakfast and dinner. Back then, a poor boy at lunch was enjoyable but often crippling, so filling that it destroyed any possibility of eating dinner. But over time the poor boy became comfort food, a sandwich to turn to for both physical sustenance and emotional connection to place.

Who, for example, doesn’t remember eating her first post-Hurricane Katrina poor boy? (Mine was a grilled shrimp at Guy’s Po-Boys). The path from Louis Armstrong International Airport to Parkway Bakery and Tavern (and R&O’s and Parran’s and Galley Seafood) is well-worn – unpacking can wait. And what could better affirm a gal’s affection for this city than finding herself in the company of eight strangers – all women – on a recent Wednesday two minutes before opening time waiting to rush the doors at Mahony’s Po-Boy Shop? The salads at Mahony’s are very good, but every last one of us ordered a poor boy.

I had a roast beef, dressed, that day. We decided to focus on roast beef poor boys in this article because roast beef seems to be the quiet but unofficially official poor boy of New Orleans, the poor boy of maximum opinion and controversy and the poor boy that old-timer New Orleanians miss most when they wax poetic about the poor boys of yore (see: “Ain’t Dere No More” sidebar). Perhaps natives have a genetically transferred appreciation for the dependability of roast beef, which would have been more consistently available than seafood back before refrigeration and deep freezers. Or, perhaps it’s the sloppy, multiple-napkin, love-me-or-leave-me attitude of the city’s most talked-about roast beef poor boys that engenders such reverence.   

Whatever the reason for their prominence, roast beef poor boys existed in New Orleans back when French bread sandwiches were still called “loaves.” The sandwich earned its current name at Martin Brothers’ Coffee Stand & Restaurant, which opened in the French Market in 1922 and later moved to the corner of St. Claude Avenue and Touro Street. The brothers Bennie and Clovis Martin, Acadiana natives, had worked as union streetcar conductors prior to becoming restaurateurs, and they sided strongly with New Orleans streetcar operators during the railway workers’ strike of ’29. In a letter dated Aug. 6 of that year, the brothers wrote to the striking carmen of Division 194, offering free meals to any of them who passed by their French Market restaurant. “We are with you ’til h– –l freezes, and when it does, we will furnish blankets to keep you warm,” they wrote.

According to Michael Mizell-Nelson, an associate professor at the University of New Orleans who wrote a chapter about New Orleans French bread for the book New Orleans Cuisine: Fourteen Signature Dishes and Their Histories, the Martins supplied strikers with sandwiches for several months at least. New Orleanians began calling the strikers – and they began calling themselves – “poor boys,” not entirely without irony. The term eventually became attached to the sandwiches that the “poor boys” ate without charge. Even paying customers at Martin Brothers in the 1930s spent just 10 cents for a 15-inch sandwich, and 15 cents for a 20-inch half-loaf. Lettuce and tomato sandwiches were free for everyone.

Around this period, writes Mizell-Nelson, “The restaurant purchased 12 to 22 head of cattle at a time and employed their own butcher to prepare the meat.”

Certainly not all that beef became hamburger steak. It is safe to assume that at the very least the roast beef gravy ladle at Martin Brothers’ passed over the strikers’ poor boy sandwiches.

Local food radio personality and author Tom Fitzmorris, a native New Orleanian, is adamant about the spelling of “poor boy.” That is how Bennie and Clovis spelled it, he says. So there. The publisher of this magazine agrees and has argued the matter more than once in these pages (see Inside, pg. 6). Other local publications have adapted the in-print spelling to reflect a modernized, conjunct – some may call it sloppy – pronunciation of the sandwich’s name: “po-boy.”

That I feel obligated to devote a paragraph to the topic of how the sandwich is spelled and why speaks, I think, to the intensity of emotion with which New Orleanians regard the poor boy. If the Rio Grande Gorge were filled with gravy, that still wouldn’t compete with how deep the story of New Orleanians and their poor boys runs. Which is why this Top 10 roast beef poor boys list is not meant to end the dialogue or stem any controversy, but rather fan the passions of the roast beef enthusiasts among us.

It was not my intention at the start of this project to remain ecumenical – honest evaluation was the goal – but this list does contain representatives from all three roast beef styles most commonly found in poor boys. There is the sliced beef variety, for which the meat is sliced either from a roast prepared in-house or from a processed deli-type loaf; the pot-roast variety, wherefore the meat is pulled from a roast and either laid upon the bread in large hunks or chopped; and the debris variety, which can be prepared in a couple of ways (roasted, boiled) and results in moist, shredded meat that recalls what happens when you put a roast in a slow cooker and forget about it for 10 hours. (Technically, debris is bits of meat and char that fall from a roast during cooking and mingle with the pan drippings, essentially creating a meaty gravy. But few poor boy shops produce enough debris in exactly this way to meet the demand for debris sandwiches. So cooks create alternative pathways to a debris-type poor boy experience.)

While I set out to compile a Top 10 list without ranking, one roast beef poor boy did rise to the top like yeasted dough in a proof box. The remaining nine are listed in alphabetical order by restaurant name.

My devotion to Mahony’s roast beef blossomed a couple of years ago during pregnancy. When nothing else tasted right, or even began to address my bottomless hunger, a large Mahony’s roast beef and gravy, dressed, extra pickles, with a side of fries, did me right every time. As I also took a new liking to processed cheese and the strangely doughnut-smelling seasoned fries at Rally’s during those nine months, my evaluation of Mahony’s roast beef needed to be tested. Which is why I put Mahony’s at the tail-end of my roast beef poor boy circuit, at which point I was, honestly, ready to eat some shrimp. But there it was, my old friend, when I unrolled the white paper that envelopes even the poor boys intended to be eaten within the restaurant. And I was ready for it.

I had snapped a quick photo of every previous poor boy I had tasted on the circuit, but the thought never occurred to me at Mahony’s. I needed to eat this one now. It contained large, meaty lobes of beef that appeared to have been tenderly tugged from a roast, invisible layers of nearly liquid fat melting into the meat as I chewed. There was, as usual, an herbaceousness that evoked bay and thyme. The gravy and meat were one, the former clinging to the latter as if magnetized, beefy and thick but not at all suggestive of flour or cornstarch. The sesame bread from Leidenheimer Baking Co. was just slightly toasted, enough to enable eating the entire sandwich as a sandwich, but not so sturdily that I felt robbed of the messiness that roast beef poor boy lovers brag about enduring as if they’ve summitted Kilimanjaro. (You may also order poor boys at Mahony’s with unseeded bread instead.)

This is not the most traditional preparation of roast beef in New Orleans. Mahony’s chef-owner, Benjamin Wicks, is a native New Orleanian, and he loosely modeled his restaurant after Norby’s, the neighborhood poor boy restaurant nearest to his childhood home in Uptown that once operated where Patois is now. But he learned his craft in culinary school and prepares his roast beef by braising it in a traditional French style – with a mire poix of seasoning vegetables, fresh herbs and red wine. Wicks estimates that 25 percent of his native New Orleanian customers are partial to the more common sliced version of the sandwich and turn their noses up at his roast beef. He says he feeds those customers Dirty Fries, smothered in gravy and cheese, to keep them happy.

The texture of the roast beef at R&O’s is so unique that I asked manager Ulysses John (“U.J.”) Mollere for a precise description of its preparation. I wish I could relate what he told me. The steps were so numerous and complex – he used words like “boil,” “steak,” “sliver,” “bamboo,” “slicer” – that I decided to just go with the result: “debris.” At R&O’s, debris looks like chips of beef suspended in a substantial, peppery, satin-finished gravy. The kitchen’s method of toasting its seeded Leidenheimer bread is just as labor-intensive as its roast beef preparation. Cooks dip the top half of the bread in gravy and apply beef and gravy to the bottom half; they slide both halves into a convection oven, open-face, so that all surfaces toast. As at Parasol’s, you may not get the satisfaction that wrangling with a messy roast beef poor boy can bring, but instead you get to enjoy eating your sandwich.

Sammy’s Food Service & Deli
3000 Elysian Fields Ave., 947-0675
There is a banner hanging above the soda fountain and iced tea dispensers at Sammy’s touting that the restaurant’s roast beef is made with higher-quality-than-the-norm Chairman’s Reserve beef. The success of Sammy’s roast beef poor boy, however, is in its homemade touches. Sliced thinly, exceedingly tender and edged with bits of char, the beef is obviously cooked with TLC. The gravy is thoughtful, too: relatively thick, specked with black pepper, and rife with slivers of garlic. Even the dressings go above and beyond. Green leaf lettuce may not offer the crunch of shredded iceberg, but it makes the sacrifice in favor of beauty and nutrients; kosher dill pickle slices are a refreshing break from the more common pickle chip, which is vinegary but not much else.

Tujague’s Bar
823 Decatur St., 525-8676
A bartender reprimanded me when I tried to order the roast beef poor boy at Tujague’s. “It’s not a poor boy,” he said. “It’s a brisket sandwich.” I wasn’t sure how I was going to finesse this article, in which I was determined to include the sandwich because it’s so delicious, until I dialed up the restaurant’s owner, Mark Latter, and asked him how he would feel if I called it a poor boy. “It is a poor boy,” he answered. Problem solved. It is true that Tujague’s brisket is boiled, not roasted, but so is the “roast beef” at Joe Sepie’s, and likely at many other poor boy haunts where owners and cooks forge their own ways to deliciousness.

Tujague’s poor boy (which is on the bar menu only) also veers from tradition in its dressing, which is the restaurant’s signature red horseradish sauce and nothing else.

Whole Foods Market
5600 Magazine St., 899-9119
It might not be fair to say that Whole Foods was the last place I expected to find one of the best roast beef poor boys in town, but it’s true. I ordered it on a lark one noontime, and my expectations soared when I saw the cook who took my order lift a handful of pre-sliced, rosy-centered beef from her refrigerated mise-en-place. She carried the beef into the back kitchen, and when she reappeared a few minutes later it was hot and bathed in gravy. Neither the beef nor the gravy was exceptionally seasoned, but this was by far the most texturally appealing roast beef poor boy in the sliced-beef style that I’ve ever eaten. Moist, tender, free of gristle. Another surprise: The poor boys at Whole Foods are made on Leidenheimer Zip Bread made from a preservative-free recipe specially formulated for the store. (Note that when the kitchen runs out of the house-roasted beef, which is stuffed with garlic and herbs and roasted to medium-rare, cooks substitute a commercial brand of organic deli meat.)

 

AIN’T DERE NO MORE
Several years ago, even before Hurricane Katrina put the fear in all New Orleanians that one day every aspect of this city’s culture could become just a page in the history books, I attended a small gathering of poor boy preservationists after-hours at Mike Serio’s Po-Boys & Deli. The meeting, one of several organized by Sandy and Katherine Whann of Leidenheimer Baking Company, was the beginning of a small movement to find ways to promote the poor boy and protect it against an influx of non-local competitors – submarine sandwich franchises, for example. The movement yielded tangible results in 2007 with the first-annual New Orleans Po-Boy Preservation Festival. The festival is staging for the fifth time on the 20th of this month on Oak Street at Carrollton Avenue.

Michael Mizell-Nelson, who has dug deep into New Orleans French bread history, and by extension the history of the poor boy, says that while the festival is outwardly all about fun, he’s genuinely concerned about the future of the city’s most iconic sandwich. “People who argue that poor boys don’t need to be preserved need to look at Koz’s and Big Shirley’s (small poor boy businesses that suffered greatly post-Katrina).”

Mizell-Nelson additionally worries that Subway is a prominent sponsor during televised Saints games. He often asks his students about their favorite poor boys, and it’s not uncommon for them to mention sandwiches at Subway or other non-poor boy franchises. “It’s pretty much a lost cause with hamburger and fried chicken franchises,” he says. “But it’s still worth fighting for the poor boy.”
On that note, we asked New Orleans Magazine online readers for recollections of their favorite “Ain’t Dere No More” roast beef poor boys. Following are some of their responses.

In the late 1960s, early ’70s, Lloyds Bar (just off of the 3900 block of Gentilly Blvd.) served a wonderful roast beef poor boy. Lloyds was a very short drive for Baptist seminary students. I also remember a great little neighborhood grocery near Montegut Street that also served a great roast beef poor boy. This was a short walk from the 7-Up bottling company where I was employed.

Clarence & Lefty’s and Minty’s Restaurant had the best roast beef poor boys in town.

Martin Brothers’ on St. Claude and Touro. Sloppiest roast beef I ever ate. Lettuce and tomatoes were always the freshest. Roasted in-house and simmered in homemade gravy. You could get one 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Technically they’re still “dere,” but because I’m not in New Orleans and I’m missing ‘dem, Parkway Bakery and Mother’s Restaurant.

Mr. Bill’s (Veterans near Causeway) – loved how the beef was always tender and it had the right amount of garlic. I was so sad when they closed.

Avenue Sandwich Shop, left, used to be a one-woman business on City Park Avenue across from Delgado. Fresh ingredients, abundance of beef, tasty gravy and fresh French bread made this the best.

Teddy’s Grill on Franklin Avenue. The bread was toasted just right, the gravy oozed out so much when you bit down you would almost squirt the person on the side of you. The roast beef was juicy, seasoned perfectly and it was always hot and messy. Absolutely a 10-napkin poor boy. You might have been better off with a bib.

 

RISING TO THE OCCASION
What – besides its loaded name – makes a poor boy a poor boy and not just another sandwich? Both history and empirical data suggest that it’s the bread. New Orleans-style French bread, that is, which tends to have a lighter crumb and a crisper exterior than typical Parisian baguettes. There is no way to tell for certain what causes the structural and textural uniqueness, though many people believe that the Mississippi River water that this city’s bakers use plays a role. Other theories call upon the German bakers who in large part overtook New Orleans’ French bread trade during the 1830s, and the fact that New Orleans French bread is made with hard wheat and no starter.

Whatever the reason, poor boy bread lends structure and balance to sandwiches that oftentimes contain either heavy fillings – roast beef, meatballs and red sauce – or delicate ones like fried seafood. I recently met with Michael Mizell-Nelson, the previously mentioned associate professor at the University of New Orleans, at a coffee shop to discuss New Orleans French bread history. A sandwich-maker from San Francisco who had been eavesdropping on our conversation stopped to comment on the quality of bread here. The man told us that he struggles to find bread that suits his sandwiches in San Francisco, a city of ample bakeries and where sourdough is revered. “You eat an oyster poor boy in New Orleans and you don’t leave with a heavy feeling like you just ate a loaf of bread.” The bread allows a poor boy’s fillings to speak for themselves, he says.

It was a funny moment, this Californian preaching to the choir, but it illustrated just how specific to this place the New Orleans style of French bread-baking is.
In the book New Orleans Cuisine: Fourteen Signature Dishes and Their Histories, Mizell-Nelson writes about how Benny and Clovis Martin, who owned Martin Brothers’ Restaurant where the term “poor boy” was coined, worked with John Gendusa Bakery to develop a uniformly shaped loaf of bread that was better suited to sandwich-making than the French bread loaves with tapered ends that previously were the only option. “Customized for the sandwich trade, Gendusa’s forty-inch loaf represented one culinary response to the quickening pace of life in industrial-age New Orleans,” Mizell-Nelson writes.

That uniform shape is now the norm for New Orleans-style French bread, at Gendusa’s and at other bakeries, and it’s another way that the Martin brothers planted their legacy in the city’s most iconic sandwich.

 

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