This Iconic California Sandwich Has Fueled A Century Of Culinary Beef

Downtown Los Angeles is a gnarly conglomeration of trendy restaurants, jewelry shops, former burlesque houses, and glacially moving traffic, so it's not usually on a tourist's must-see list. But there are two early 20th-century establishments that still draw in busloads, and both take credit for inventing the classic French dip sandwich. The battle between Philippe The Original and Cole's has been waged for over a century, and though there's circumstantial evidence that favors one restaurant over the other, it's not definitive. For the uninitiated, the French dip is basically thinly sliced roast beef piled into a French roll with a dipping bowl of rich au jus on the side. It's usually served with fries, but that's about as French as the sandwich gets. 

Cole's has the distinction of allegedly being the oldest public house in Los Angeles. Henry Cole opened his eponymous restaurant/saloon in 1908 in the Pacific Electric Building, which was the railway hub for reportedly 100,000 commuters every day, many of whom stopped into Cole's for a bite and a beer. It's unknown when the establishment's head chef first made a French dip, but legend has it that he softened the crusty French roll by dipping it into gravy for a customer with gum problems. But there's an alternate version of the story. In a 1997 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Gitti Beheshti, Cole's owner at the time, claimed the bread simply fell into the gravy for a customer, prompting another person in line to order their sandwich the same way.

While Cole's story is entirely anecdotal, passed down from employee to employee over the years, Philippe's also has conflicting origin stories, though there's a bit of interesting history that seems to back up its claim. French immigrant Philippe Mathieu opened Philippe's Restaurant in 1908, and as Mathieu's descendants tell it, in 1917, Mathieu — similar to what purportedly happened at Cole's — accidentally dropped some sandwich bread he prepared for a fireman into a roasting pan of beef drippings. Of course, it's also said that Mathieu just angrily swiped the bread in gravy to appease the presumably same fireman who complained that his bread was stale.

Perhaps the most earth-shattering theory comes from Mathieu himself, who was interviewed in 1951 by the Los Angeles Times when Philippe's moved to its present-day location (transcribed via The Linguist List). Mathieu claimed that the first French dip was made from roast pork (not roast beef) for a policeman who also requested pickles, onions, and olives as a garnish.

Whichever story is to be believed, the sandwich's name seems to be the clincher that Mathieu likely invented it. At the turn of the 20th century, the French dip was a well-known tailoring technique for giving the appearance of a slimmer waistline, and Mathieu was probably slyly joking that his fatty pork sandwich would do the opposite. If you're not in LA, you can make this saber-rattling sandwich at home by swapping roast beef for ribeye or by making a vegetarian French dip with mushrooms.