Let’s get this out of the way: although this dish is called Italian beef, it isn’t Italian, in that it does not hark from the nation-state known as Italy. It does come from the Italian-American immigrant community, and is typically associated with Chicago. But it’s not Italian in the Tuscany/Parma/Liguria/Emilia-Romagna sense of the word. It is, as my grandfather would have put it, “Eyetalian.”
