Tacoma bar channels ‘The Bear’ with a top-notch take on the Italian beef

As a former Chicagoan in Tacoma, I immediately felt comfortable at The Red Hot, sitting on a bar stool, drinking beer and eating hot dogs. So when its kitchen team posted a video of the Windy City’s other favorite sandwich, in all its dripping-jus and giardiniera glory, I knew I would find myself there one Tuesday, sitting on a bar stool, drinking beer and eating Italian beef.

There are other classic Chicago foods I occasionally miss, but I would not have cited the beef. Hot dogs, yes. Crunchy tavern-style pizza with sweet tomato sauce under the cheese, indeed. Endless choices for incredible tacos, 100 percent. But a sandwich packed with roasted sirloin, layered in a hoagie bun, the whole thing dipped in meat juice? It’s a mess you don’t often accept, at least not if you want to save your stomach lining.

Stu Miller, the food brain of The Red Hot to his brother Chris Miller’s beer noggin, explained that the bar had served Italian beefs when it first opened next door (now Brass Monkey Tattoo Co.) in 2007. Quickly assembled, they would not have passed expat muster, he admitted, especially not after the Summer of ‘22.

Last June, without prior fanfare, FX aired a show about a humble Italian beef shop and its tormented, talented owner by way of bequeathment. It became a breakout hit.

I watched in earnest after I got tired of people asking me, “Have you watched ‘The Bear’?” In the pivotal seventh episode — all 17 minutes shot in a single, painfully tense, nowhere-to-run take — the small staff of Mr. Beef crumbles at the seams when the online ordering machine spits out more slips than they could possibly manage in an entire day, let alone in the lunch rush.

Yet we never see the beloved beef. In fact, one of my biggest takeaways from the world’s post-Bear obsession with this sandwich was that it wasn’t about the beef. Like the restaurant, the star dish was itself an important character, driving the storyline and under-girding the interplay of each person with one another and themselves.

Which brings me back to The Red Hot.

“Maybe I was watching ‘The Bear’…,” Stu Miller told me on a Tuesday in March. He shared the idea with Nick Westover, The Red Hot’s kitchen manager, and, “Nick pretty much ran with it.”

Westover had never dabbled in beef, but he had learned to roast many meats at Brewers Row in Tacoma’s North End. YouTube watch parties and other research ensued.

The beef debuted in late October, but it took my procrastinating self until almost spring to get there on a Tuesday night.

The timing was serendipitous.

“Just within the last month or so,” said Westover, did they feel like they could stop tweaking it. “You don’t want to go too far because sometimes you hit the sweet spot, and I think we found it.”

It took about four months of weekly improvements: to the brine (salt and secret spices for 30 hours), the cook time and temperature (about three hours at 370 degrees for each roughly 16-pound sirloin), the thickness of the slice (akin to a thin-cut request at the deli counter), when and how fast to dip.

The four-day affair begins on Saturday with the brine. Westover and his kitchen crew roast on Sunday, reserving the juices for the gravy, and slice on Monday. On Tuesday, six ounces of meat is heated and soaked in that jus to order, then layered into the bun, rapidly dipped with tongs back into the liquid, and finished with giardiniera.

It was also a headache to source this Italian condiment of pickled vegetables — usually celery, carrots, cauliflower, peppers and olives — that, in Chicago, can be ordered hot or mild on beefs and pizzas. Now they have a reliable Chicago brand, said Miller.

Perhaps the trickiest element was the bread, as any East Coaster in the Puget Sound will know when they crave a hoagie and can’t find one. Despite much initial love for The Red Hot’s beef, continued Miller, “We knew the thing that was keeping it down was the bread.”

Seattle’s Macrina Bakery and its head baker, Phuong Bui, rescued the mission with his Bui Bun, inspired by banh mi. One of the finer points of this beef — over, honestly, many in Chicago — is that the sandwich holds together despite being dipped.

For the uninitiated, in its hometown, you request a beef dipped into the cooking liquid; wet, meaning a half-dip or ladle situation; or dry, where only the beef is juiced and not the whole sandwich. At The Red Hot, they choose the only correct answer for you, and that is Door No. 1.

You also won’t be able to request hot or mild, but aside from my fellow ex-Chicagoans — including one customer Westover says visits almost every week — most Tacomans don’t know the difference.

“People don’t ask for hot giardiniera,” Miller said, inquiring with his staff. “They usually ask, ‘What is giardiniera?’”

And they probably mis-prounounce it.

Luckily at The Red Hot, their motto reads, in part: “No jerks.”

THE RED HOT TACOMA

▪ 2914 6th Ave., Tacoma, 253-779-0229, redhottacoma.com

▪ Italian Beef Tuesdays, 11 a.m.-sellout

▪ Visit on Wednesday for the same meat in cheesesteak form, open-sellout