At one time, the French dip was a signature dish of Los Angeles, where it was created. But it is now ubiquitous, especially west of the Mississippi, where its aliases include wet beef and beef Manhattan. The beef is warm, sliced thin, and bunned in a torpedo roll. Hot mustard or horseradish is also part of the presentation. But what distinguishes a French dip from such regional comparables as the upper Midwest’s hot beef and New Orleans’s roast beef and debris is that natural beef gravy, known by the curious non-noun au jus, is served alongside the sandwich in a cup for pouring or dipping.
Despite that fact, neither Philippe the Original nor Cole’s P.E. Buffet, the two restaurants that claim to have invented French dip, serves it with gravy on the side. Both moisten the roll with gravy before the sandwich is assembled and (optionally) moisten it again after it is put together (known as double dipping). Philippe’s version of its birth says that a cafeteria counterman—or possibly proprietor Philippe Mathieu—was preparing a roast beef sandwich for an impatient customer one day in 1918. The sandwich slipped out of its maker’s hand into the gravy trough. Rather than wait for another one to be assembled from scratch, the customer said, “I’ll take it just like that.” Cole’s P.E. Buffet claims that its kitchen made the first French dip to satisfy a customer whose teeth were so bad that he asked for his sandwich to be softened by a soak in gravy before it was served.