Manhattan(s) in Indianapolis

Last August I ate–and posted about–a “Hot Roast Beef Sandwich” I had in Sioux Falls, South Dakota as my family was returning home from visiting Mindy’s parents in Washington State. The Phillips Avenue Diner’s version of this sandwich was served with shredded, pot-roast style beef in between two slices of white bread, mashed potatoes on the side, with a layer of brown gravy poured over all.

Not long after that, on our way downstate to visit my family, we stopped to eat at the Red Wheel Restaurant in Rantoul, IL. While we perused the menu, I noticed an item called a “Hot Beef Manhattan” and could not resist ordering it. I received something very similar to what I’d had in South Dakota. This was served open-face rather than closed, with sliced beef rather than shredded, but otherwise the particulars were the same–roast beef on white bread, mashed potatoes, brown gravy.

I’ve stopped by Red Wheel a few times since then, and tried a few of their Manhattans–they are not listed either as sandwiches or as entrees but have their own section of the menu. Most recently I had the breaded pork tenderloin version, featuring the butterflied, pounded-thin, breaded piece of pork loin common to the Midwestern US that I’ve written about multiple times. This time, however, it was served open-face with white bread, mashed potatoes, brown gravy.

In the meantime, I have continued to order and enjoy “Hot (insert meat here) sandwiches” from various diners and greasy spoons, such as this hot pork sandwich I had delivered for lunch one day from Pappas Restaurant & Lounge in Alsip, IL, also served open faced, with a lighter-colored pork-based gravy and the crusts inexplicably cut off the bread.

What can I say? Comfort food is comforting; that’s kind of the whole point of it, and comfort was hard to come by the past year and a half. I’ll take whatever you’re serving if it comes with a bucket of gravy poured over it.

The variation in names interested me though, and I asked around, on Twitter and on Facebook: what do you call this combination of hot roast beef, white bread, mashed potatoes, and gravy? And where are you located? I didn’t learn much. Most folks just call it some variation of “Hot” or “Open-faced” or “Hot open-faced” beef (or turkey or chicken or hamburger etc) sandwich. One guy who worked seasonally at a restaurant in Garvin, MN said they called it a hot beef “Commercial” there, which I found fascinating. I didn’t see that item listed on his restaurant’s menu but did confirm that it’s a term common in southwestern Minnesota. Another person volunteered that the chain deli McAlister’s calls it “The Big Nasty.” Someone else in Northeastern Wisconsin says they call it a Hot Chicago-style beef there. I wasn’t able to confirm that independently–mostly because it’s impossible to search for “Chicago-style” anything without being inundated by links discussing pizza, hot dogs, and Italian beef–but she provided a screenshot of a menu from Marinette, WI, and sure enough there it is.

When I first tried it, I asked the waitress at the Red Wheel why it was called a Manhattan there, and she didn’t know. Turns out Wikipedia had me covered:

The dish was first served in a restaurant under the name “Beef Manhattan” in a now-defunct Indianapolis deli in the late 1940s where it gained traction as a Hoosier staple. The dish was named by Naval Ordnance Plant Indianapolis (NOPI) workers who were trained on a fabrication of the Norden Bombsight in Manhattan during World War II. They enjoyed the open-faced sandwich they had in Manhattan and brought it back to their cafeteria as the “Beef Manhattan”.

Beef Manhattan on Wikipedia

The Wikipedia article also said that the term “Manhattan” was used for this dish only in “the Midwest, the South, and parts of the western United States.” I’m not sure how widespread it is in the Midwest though–I’d never heard of it until last August. Searching around, I found a restaurant in Danville, IL that serves a number of Manhattans, including one with ham that I’d dearly love to have tried this month but they are closed until August for vacation. I’ve located other places in Mattoon and Paris, IL serving “hot beef Manhattans.” So there are a few spots in Eastern Illinois that use the term, but many more that simply call them hot sandwiches.

But why not just go to the source?

Not Manhattan, much as I’d love to. As the Wikipedia page notes, “the term ‘Manhattan’ is a misnomer as the beef and turkey variants are usually referred to as ‘open-face sandwiches’ in New York City.” If I asked for a hot beef Manhattan in Manhattan I’m not sure what I’d get and I’m too chicken to get on Urban Dictionary and check. By “the source” of course I mean Indianapolis, which appears to be the epicenter of the phenomenon. The deli that originated the Manhattan is now defunct, according to Wikipedia (which curiously does not name the deli) but I found a deli called Shapiro’s that still serves one, and a Google search for best Manhattan in Indianapolis turns up many a Top Ten list. Plenty of them are referencing the cocktail rather than the sandwich, but still… ROAD TRIP!

Indianapolis is…

There’s a lot to like there. We stayed in a hotel downtown, a block away from the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, an 86+ meter tall spire decked with neoclassical sculpture, surrounded by a brick-cobbled roundabout and the buildings of downtown Indianapolis, a mixture of neoclassical-style state buildings and shinier, newer corporate towers and hotels.

There are negatives as well. The well-kept and beautiful coexists with the run-down and perpetually-under-construction. Though there is a rudimentary grid pattern to many of the streets, the road closures and random one-ways ensure that there is no such thing as a straight line route in the town. These are relatively petty complaints though, and we were largely won over by the walkable downtown area and highly available bike and scooter rentals, as well as the nearby White River State Park, which also boasts a manmade canal with walks and fountains alongside it.

We needed to do a lot of walking, you see. The first thing we did upon arriving in town was make a beeline for Shapiro’s Delicatessen, a block or so away from Lucas Oil Stadium where the Colts play.

Shapiro’s, like Manny’s in Chicago, is a cafeteria-style deli, trays and plasticware at one end of the counter, a cash register at the other, and a whole bunch of food in between. The line first makes its way past some plated-and-wrapped desserts, salads, and cold side dishes, then on to the hot prepared foods, where folks working the various stations put together your plate. Since plexiglass now separates the clientele from the slicers and scoopers and sandwich-makers, there is a microphone and speaker there to help facilitate communication.

We arrived shortly after 1pm on a Saturday and I was dismayed to note that the menuboard stated that the Hot Beef Manhattan was only available after 4pm. When it was my turn to order, I crossed my fingers and said into the microphone, “Could I talk you into making me a manhattan? I drove three hours to try it.”

“You sure you don’t want a nice beef tongue sandwich instead?” quipped the fellow working the slicer.

I got my Manhattan.

The Shapiro’s Hot Beef Manhattan consisted of 2 slices of white bread–not cheap squishy white bread but not artisanal sourdough either, something simple but substantial–cut diagonally and arranged overlapping in a row across the plate like a poker hand, topped with mashed potatoes, a double-handful of thin-sliced tender beef, more mashed potatoes, and enough gravy to cover everything on the plate thoroughly.

That gravy was real, not the glossy dark brown food service type of gravy, but something that bespoke time spent roasting meats and collecting the juices, a handmade amalgam of flour and fat and flavor. The mashed potatoes were relatively smooth but the occasional bit of unwhipped potato I detected said they too were handmade. From the shape and texture of the beef I’d say it was brisket, sliced wonderfully thin and practically dissolving on the tongue.

Like the prototypical Midwestern food it is, this Hot Beef Manhattan appears to be a pile of beige glop, but it is a delicious pile of beige glop. Like other comfort foods, it is fatty and carby, rich and warm and filling, and not especially challenging. It is the culinary equivalent of a warm blanket and a snuggly dog. I would eat it twice a week if I lived in Indianapolis. When the beige got to be too much, I’d have a little salad, or fruit, or take a bite of one of their good, generous, mustardy deviled eggs.

Mindy may have missed out by choosing not to order anything at Shapiro’s, but her choice for lunch was a good one as well. After Shapiro’s we headed for The Garage, a food hall in Indianapolis’ Bottleworks District, passing up a number of equally-interesting vendors to order grilled steak skewers with chimichurri sauce and Pão de queijo from Brazilian stand Gaucho’s Fire.

The grilled steak was simply seasoned and competently grilled, and chimichurri of course makes everything taste better. The Pão de queijo were interesting though, dense and soft and moist, stretchy and a little chewy from the tapioca flour they’re made with. That is something I’d be interested in trying again.

We were not in Indianapolis to try Brazilian food though. We were there to explore the Manhattan. I didn’t expect to find anything better than the example I’d had for lunch, but many of the Top Ten lists I’d read had referenced another spot, a place called Mann’s Grille.

Mann’s Grill has a lot of character. Located in a less urban area of West Indianapolis, with a trailer park on one side of it and a residential neighborhood (including a garden produce stand where Mindy and I bought some vegetables and a canteloupe) on the other, Mann’s itself has a very small-town diner feel. No counter to sit at, more of the wood paneled walls, dark wood booths, occasional mismatched seat cushions, and a covered outdoor seating area that was pretty clearly slapped onto the front of the building to comply with a Covid protocol at some point in the past year or so. It’s the kind of place that, if you judged it solely on appearance, you would not stop at. It is, visually, kind of a dump.

This kind of dump is generally my kind of place, though. They’re cheap and satisfying and lack any kind of pretense. At their best, they provide home-style cooking done right. At their worst, they can be truly awful. Most places fall somewhere between–they take a few food-service type shortcuts here and there but generally do a good job making things by hand.

We walked in and seated ourselves at a booth near the front, the sole unoccupied table I could see in a bustling small restaurant. diners actively chatting in the type of Midwestern accent that leans more toward the South than toward Minnesota. Our waitress was a rail-thin, no bullshit type, but cheerful, unafraid to answer our questions about the menu, decisively, with exactly what she thought. Mindy was on the fence between ordering the country-fried steak or the steak tips with mushrooms and gravy, and asked the waitress what she thought. Without hesitation, she said the country-fried steak was the way to go. When I asked whether she’d recommend the beef Manhattan or the turkey Manhattan, she said “the turkey is good, don’t get me wrong, but the beef Manhattan is the best thing on the menu.”

I should have listened to her.

Mindy ordered the country fried steak, with mashed potatoes and fried green tomatoes as her side dishes. Offered a choice of gravy–“brown, white, or yellow”–she chose the brown gravy. The country-fried steak was a good rendition, crisp and tender and hot, with a brown gravy that probably came out of a giant food service can but tasted alright in that context.

The side of fried green tomatoes was well-executed and plain, a fine version of a Southern classic. Mindy says that her own fried green tomatoes are better, but can be relied on to order this dish any time we see it on a menu regardless. The most surprising thing about them is that they are considered a side rather than an appetizer–that is, a free extra for any of their entrees interchangeable with, for example, french fries, mashed potatoes, coleslaw, a side salad, etc, rather than a separately charged dish.

Of course I ordered the hot turkey Manhattan, going against our waitress’ very pointed advice. For my additional side–mashed potatoes were, of course, a given–I chose a salad, which came out immediately, a refrigerated prepackaged salad of lettuce, red cabbage, tomatoes, and shredded cheese in a clear plastic clamshell container.

The hot turkey Manhattan, the star of the show, was the last thing to hit our table, and it landed a little anticlimactically.

First, the good: the turkey was magnificent, clearly roasted in-house, tender, not dry, a mix of white meat and dark, just really good turkey. Turkey isn’t easy to do right, and this was.

Just about everything else goes into the bad or indifferent columns though. The bread was cheap squishy white bread, nothing wrong with it but nothing particularly right with it either. The mashed potatoes were clearly the instant flaked type, textureless and without much in the way of flavor. And the gravy was a vaguely yellow, semigelatinous mess. Perhaps mucilaginous is a better word, as it had the color and consistency of snot. I did eat most of the sandwich–this turkey did not deserve to be wasted–but if I ever return to Mann’s Grill, I’ll remember our waitress’ words and get the beef instead.

I’m more likely to go back to the Workingman’s Friend though next time I’m in Indianapolis, and get another one of these beauties.

As for the remainder of our time in Indianapolis this weekend, we spent our Saturday evening walking around a slightly rainy Mile Square, the downtown area of Indianapolis, visiting a few cocktail bars, even taking the opportunity to taste a dish we hadn’t had previously.

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We awoke the next morning slightly the worse for wear, but had a restorative breakfast at a bakery/cafe called Leviathan Bakehouse before leaving town. The sourdough baguette they used for this jambon beurre was a bit crustier/chewier than I generally like for a sandwich–crust? yes please! but the crumb should have a little give to it I think. Still, I went in feeling like a zombie and came back out feeling like a human being again.

I’ll also need to look up the ham they used–a city ham from Indianapolis shop Turchetti’s–next time I’m there. As I said, there’s a lot to like in Indianapolis, and even more yet to explore. It’s only a few hours away. I will be back.