Flying to Minneapolis for a Jucy Lucy

A few months ago, I realized that the Jucy Lucy was coming up on our List, and that its turn would happen to coincide with the month of Valentine’s Day. The Jucy Lucy, a melty cheese-stuffed hamburger originating in Minneapolis, would have been easy enough to make at home–my eldest son even got me a “Patty Buddy” stuffed burger press for Christmas in anticipation. But nothing warms my cold frozen heart more than taking my beloved someplace even colder and more frozen, and flights were cheap, so with some trepidation I approached her about combining a short Valentine’s Day trip with some sandwich research.

Luckily for me, my wife is both tolerant and practical–and also loves a good cheeseburger–so rather than being enraged by having to share a romantic trip with a sandwich, she was enthusiastic! So the weekend before Valentine’s Day we loaded the fridge up with easy-to-prepare meals for the kids, hopped a flight from Chicago to Minneapolis that lasted slightly over 1 hour, got a rental car, and made it to Matt’s Bar just before the line went out the door.

Most of the articles you’ll read about the “best” or the “original” Jucy Lucy in Minneapolis will mention two places–Matt’s and the 5-8 Club. Most of these articles will also end up favoring Matt’s for a few reasons–the meat is better seasoned, the cheese is more volcanically melty, the fries are better. At 5pm on a Saturday, we walked in through the front door to a crowd of standees waiting for a table. Nobody takes any names or reservations, but the people are friendly and people get seated in basically the order in which they arrive.

After a 30-45 minute wait, we made our way to a booth where we learned that we were not to be the first distinguished visitors to Matt’s Bar.

The menu at Matt’s is simple–burgers and fries, for the most part, with a chicken sandwich or ham & cheese for those philistines who aren’t down with the ground round (like my younger self, to my shame). Milk and pop, for the kids. Coffee, for the olds. And of course, beer.

Beer is the natural accompaniment to a Jucy Lucy, and so when the waitress came around to get our orders, we chose a Jucy Lucy with fried onions for each of us, an order of fries to split (they are enormous), and a pitcher of local brew Grain Belt Premium, a straw-colored American Adjunct Lager, corny, fizzy, light, not very good but the kind of thing you drink in this kind of place while eating this kind of a sandwich. We went there for the experience, and Grain Belt was the beer for the job.

With one man working a griddle and fry station behind the bar, the orders don’t come out too terribly quick but it was a pleasant wait, with charming company, and we didn’t mind a bit. Still, after a trip through Midway airport, a flight, however short, and the wait both in line and at the table, by the time the Jucy Lucys hit the table, we were ravenous. Though we did manage to restrain ourselves long enough to get a picture of them fully clothed.

The story goes that at Matt’s they saved on plates and invested in napkins instead. The burgers came wrapped in wax paper, and the fries in a plastic boat lined with the same. The fries were good, well-fried and crisp. Once unwrapped, the burger looked much like any other pub burger, nicely browned on a griddle, with a standard hamburger bun, onions and pickles, ketchup and mustard available on the table.

Inside that plain looking patty though is a gusher of molten American cheese. I was struck while eating this of the similarity between these fried diced onions and the reconstituted onion bits in a Big Mac. Not necessarily in a bad way–I found myself wishing I had some Thousand Island dressing to add to the burger. The meat was well seasoned, but had been worked fairly hard and had a tightly-bound hockey puck texture that was my only real strike against the sandwich.

It didn’t photograph terribly well though, so we asked for another to go and headed to our hotel in downtown Minneapolis. It was a fancy place, with a beautiful basement lounge where we enjoyed a few cocktails, and art mounted on the walls of every room.

I found myself fumbling while trying to explain to the helpful desk clerk why I needed a sharp knife delivered to the room–“nothing weird, really, I just need to cut open this sandwich”–but she took it in stride and brought me a few knives from the kitchen a few minutes later. Now we’d get to see the interior of Matt’s Jucy Lucy.

Even after a 15 minute drive, a short wait for our room to be ready, and another brief pause awaiting the implements of sandwich dissection, the cheese in Matt’s burger was still molten.

After a night enjoying the sights of downtown Minneapolis, we awoke the next morning with some hours to kill before our next appointment with a Jucy Lucy at the 5-8 Club. I’m sure there were many more things we could have explored in Minneapolis, but one of our main joys while traveling is seeking out interesting things to eat, so we drove to neighboring St. Paul, Minnesota, only a few miles away, to check out an interesting ethnic market I’d read about originally on LTHForum, the Hmongtown Marketplace.

It was amazing. Despite the relatively mild February weather (40° and sunny) the open-air sections of the market did not appear to be running, but inside in the back there was a series of stalls, mostly selling variations of the same dishes, and everything we tried there was absolutely outstanding. There were chicken wings stuffed with glass noodles, pork sausages flavored with ginger and garlic that may have been the best sausages I’ve ever tried, egg rolls, papaya salad, and a Thai-style larb salad made with minced raw beef that I had to try when I saw it. Eventually we had to leave because we just couldn’t eat any more, and we knew we still had a couple big burgers to get down shortly.

And yes, these were not sandwiches, so this may not be entirely relevant for our site. I struggled with whether to spend words on this particular excursion. I justified it by picking up a few more of those amazing sausages and making an amazing sandwich of Hmong sausage and Lao-style papaya salad on a baguette a few days later.

So we spent some time enjoying the outdoors and walking, to the extent we were able in February in Minnesota. We saw Minnehaha falls, and looked at some frozen lakes, and enjoyed each others’ company, putting off lunch until we knew we had just enough time to eat and still get to the airport with a bit of time to spare before our flight. We still weren’t terribly hungry, but when you fly to another city to try a sandwich, you need to stick to the plan.

The 5-8 Club in Minneapolis is right out near the airport–we’d driven past it without noticing on our way to Matt’s the previous night. If Matt’s had been the perfect Saturday night joint–divey, bustling, and loud–the 5-8 Club was the perfect Sunday lunch place–booths, TVs showing sports (I kept getting distracted watching skiing. I never watch skiing) and families visiting after church. The decor was kitschier than Matt’s, with a few questionable items as well.

The menu at the 5-8 Club was more extensive than Matt’s as well, and they served a breaded pork tenderloin sandwich that would have tempted me on any other day. Mindy and I enjoyed a side order of fried cheese curds while we waited for our burgers.

In addition to the Juicy Lucy, the 5-8 Club’s menu has a burger called the Saucy Sally, in which the burger is stuffed with “secret sauce” and comes with cheese on top, with a bit of Thousand Island dressing. Additionally, unlike Matt’s, the 5-8 Club offers multiple cheese options for their Juicy Lucys, including a very tempting bleu cheese option and one with ghost pepper cheese . However, to keep any comparison as apples-to-apples as possible, I elected to stick with good old-fashioned American cheese for my Juicy Lucy, which I ordered with the potato wedges that 5-8 calls “Jojos,” while Mindy ordered the Saucy Sally with fries.

The buns here were bakery-fresh and higher quality than those at Matt’s. The meat, though less well-seasoned, was more loosely-packed and had far better texture. The cheese was fine, though not as gushingly melty as the cheese at Matt’s had been. The “secret sauce” in Mindy’s Saucy Sally was a white sauce with a slightly bitter flavor, not offensive but nothing terribly exciting either. Both the fries and the Jojos were just fine. Though many individual ingredients were higher quality, somehow the whole didn’t come together in the way it had at Matt’s.

We made our way to the airport and, despite a longer line than anticipated, got to our gate in time for boarding. Minneapolis doesn’t seem like a natural destination for an overnight trip in February, but we’d had a great time. Real life awaited.

So which place had the better Jucy Lucy? The secret seems to be in the spelling.

Matt’s serves a Jucy Lucy. The 5-8 Club serves a Juicy Lucy. The Blue Door Club, recommended to us by our waitress at Matt’s as the only other place she’d go for a Jucy Lucy, actually serves what they call a Blucy Burger. The Nook serves a Juicy Nookie. Seems like many places distinguish themselves by what they call their cheese-stuffed burgers. (Hence Matt’s calling themselves the home of the original Jucy Lucy when the 5-8 Club has been around longer.)

Yet the spelling Jucy Lucy, minus the “i” as used by Matt’s, seems to be the standard. Judging by the crowds trying to get in on a Saturday night, for many people the burger is the standard too. If I get back to Minneapolis and I’m in the mood for a Lucy, I might try the Blue Door or the Nook or one of the several other joints slinging this sandwich, whatever they call it. I wouldn’t be against trying Matt’s or the 5-8 Club again either. I like the dive bar ambience of Matt’s, and there’s plenty left to explore on the menu at the 5-8 Club.

Most of all though, I’d go back to Hmongtown Marketplace and get more of that amazing Hmong sausage. I wonder if they’ll ship?