One-Hit Wonder

Like all great stories and all great sandwiches, the origins of the
French dip are clouded in mystery, the tale told and retold by various
apostles until the original truth is completely obscured.

Here is the best version: It’s 1908 at Philippe’s, a dusty little
deli in downtown Los Angeles. A beat cop (twirling his nightstick,
shining his copper badge with his coat sleeve, his booshy moostache
twitching) walks through the door one afternoon and asks Philippe
Mathieu (known as Frenchy to his friends) for a beef sandwich. The last
baguette on hand is a day old, and Frenchy, in a lightning-
strike
moment of cinematic majesty (Matrix-style slow motion,
Vangelis’s soaring score from Chariots of Fire, lots of Star
Trek lens flares), notices the roasting pan full of beef drippings
next to the cutting board and baptizes the hard bread to resuscitate
it, then loads it full of sliced, roasted beef. Cut to a montage of
runaway sandwich success, as word of Frenchy’s Dipped Sandwich spreads
through the L.A. police force and criminal underworld and on to the
Jazz-Age hedonists of the Hollywood hoi polloi. A star is born.

On my first visit to Philippe’s, almost 90 years later, unaware of
the significance of this sandwich in the restaurant’s (and the world’s)
history, I ordered a grilled cheese with soup. Rizzo’s French Dip,
located in Ballard, takes special precautions against anyone making an
embarrassing mistake. There is only one thing on the menu at Rizzo’s
French Dip. The only choice you’re allowed to make is “Cheese or No
Cheese.”

Tony Rizzo, a recent Los Angeles transplant, opened Rizzo’s with his
cousin Frank Rizzo. Tony stands at the back of the sandwich shop, shirt
unbuttoned to midchest to reveal a large double-
strand gold
necklace nestled into his prodigious chest hair. From his well-gelled
thinning hairdo to his crisply groomed beard to his leather loafers, he
looks every inch the Italian sandwich-shop owner sent over from central
casting. The restaurant, too, is right out of a scenic designer’s
sketchbook: red-and-white-checkered plastic tablecloths, a picture of
Marilyn Monroe, and a cooler full of Coke. Even the second-unit
direction is flawless, including the chef (Nathan, a formerly homeless
kid whom owner Frank has mentored back to real life—yes, truly)
emerging from the kitchen with a greasy apron and a flyswatter, trying
over and over again to kill a bee buzzing through the room.

The sandwich itself, both with cheese and without, is, like the
restaurant itself, perfect in its simplicity—there’s no dressing,
no lettuce, nothing to distract from the beauty of the meat. The beef
is succulent, roasted in-house and hand-sliced, then left to simmer in
its own juices for hours. The carrots, celery, garlic, and other
vegetables and herbs roasted with the beef are liquefied and added to a
house-made stock, into which about 12 inches of French bread is dipped
before getting loaded up with beef. The bread is made from a custom
recipe, baked only for Rizzo’s by the Crown Hill Safeway. (There’s
something charming about baguettes custom-made at Safeway. On the one
hand, designing a bread shows knowledge of breads beyond the basics, a
desire to use the right bread for the right purpose. But having it made
by one of the world’s largest supermarket chains represents a
blue-collar rejection of, or maybe just a disinterest in, the
fashionableness of artisan bakers.) While the bread does its soggy job
without losing structural integrity, there’s no crunch, even straight
out of Frank Rizzo’s hands and eaten then and there. When you’re
creating a dish with so few moving parts, every element becomes that
much more important, and here there are only three: meat, juice, and
bread. The lack of any crispness in the bread, and the bread’s
uniformly dense interior, seems to dull the delicate spicing of the
meat and juice, and prevents the sandwich from reaching its full,
enormous potential.

Rizzo’s is, as its name implies, a family operation: Frank, the
patriarch, and an assortment of children, cousins, and mentored
formerly homeless kids work in the shop together, and their familial
passion for food is obvious. There’s no music playing at Rizzo’s, only
a television in the corner tuned to the Food Network, and the youngest
son, Sonny “Prince” Rizzo, talks about the various Food Network
programs with the fluency kids usually have in baseball stats or
skateboard wheels.

Anthony Rizzo, the teenager working the front counter, notes the
irony of Rizzo’s location, half a block from Lunchbox Laboratory, home
of the universe’s largest burger menu, with endless options of gourmet
meat-cheese-toppings-sauce combinations. “With them and their 500
burger combinations,” says Frank, “we’ve got like 501 things to eat on
this block. We just got the one thing. When we took over this space, I
looked at the kitchen, and it was tiny, everything’s miniature, so I
thought, ‘If I just do one item, we’ll have more than enough
room.'”

The shop’s been open almost two months now, and Frank says that
while sales have been great, he still lost $184 last month. “But, you
know, it’s a place for the guys to get together, away from the wives
and the girlfriends,” he says. “I’d spend $184 to get away from my wife
for a month.” He’s not gotten away very far, however; his wife, Tammy,
is the psychic next door to the restaurant, and the team of formerly
homeless kids he’s helped lives in the house behind the shop. Rizzo’s
is about family, and food, and having built a family that includes
blood, marriage, and choice. Frank—chef, patriarch—says,
“So I got like a whole block over here of employees and family. Some
days is love, some days we cuss each other out, but before we go to
bed, it’s always all love.”