Juicy Lucy

A cook at Matt's Bar in south Minneapolis lays a slice of American folded into a small square in the middle of a flattened ball of ground chuck, sets a second flattened ball on top of it, and seals the rim of the resulting double-thick patty with the heel of his hand the whole way around the circumference. The rim has to be crimped clean or the cheese will find a seam and run out onto the steel. The patty goes to the flat-top thumb-printed in the center to keep it from doming as it cooks. It is left alone for four minutes a side. By the time it comes off it has a dark sear on both faces and a molten core under enough pressure to spray the inside of the customer's mouth when the bite goes through the crust. That spray is the entire sandwich.

Burying the cheese is the geometry. A draped slice on top of a single patty cooks in the residual heat of the meat and arrives as a soft warm lid that the bun compresses against the beef; the temperature of that cheese tops out near a hundred and seventy Fahrenheit before the bun closes over it. Cheese sealed between two patties for eight minutes on a hot flat-top reaches and holds full liquid temperature against the heat conducting through the meat, and the molten layer at the center of a cut patty is closer to two hundred Fahrenheit when it is opened. That temperature is the danger and the appeal. The first bite cracks the seared crust and the trapped center under pressure releases as a jet that scalds the roof of the mouth and slicks the lower lip with hot fat. Eating one with attention to a spec is the standing local advice. The interior cools slowly and the second bite is no safer than the first.

The build fails at the crimp and only at the crimp, and the failure modes are spectacular. A patty sealed with a soft hand leaves a thin seam at the rim where the two layers meet, and as the slug inside reaches temperature it finds that seam and runs out onto the flat-top in a sheet of bubbling oil that smokes off the cook's grill within seconds. The eater receives a patty with a hollow center and a ring of charred American at the foot of the bun, which is not what was ordered. A patty packed too thick in the center sees the slug fail to fully liquefy in the four minutes the surface cook needs, and the bite delivers a gummy plug rather than a spurt. A patty packed too thin sees the slug burn through to the flat-top on the second side, and the same draining failure presents in slow motion. A puncture through the top of the patty for any reason, an early thermometer probe, a fork test, an attempt to flip with a tined utensil, hard-fails the seal and the cheese runs. The flat hand at the rim during assembly is the move the cook learns in the first week and never stops thinking about.

You sit at the bar at Matt's at half past noon on a Tuesday and the room is full of brown paneling, a long row of stools, two flat-tops behind the cooks, and the smell of butter and seared beef saturating the dark air. The build lands in a small wax-paper basket on a plain white bun with a single yellow chip on the side. The patty is dark brown at the crust and unmarked on top, no slice draped on it, no visible cheese anywhere. The bite goes through the bun, then the crust of the meat, and a small geyser of pale yellow American arrives in the back of the mouth at scalding heat. The taste is browned beef and salt fat and that one bright run of liquid against the tongue, and the bun starts compressing into the underside almost immediately as the fat soaks the crumb. Two bites finish the patty side; the second half of the bite is bun and the last of the spurt already going slack at the rim of the cut. A bartender hands over a glass of cold beer the moment the sandwich is set down because the heat needs the cut.

The two south Minneapolis bars that built the sandwich treat the spelling as the side a customer takes. Matt's Bar opened on Cedar Avenue South at 35th Street in 1954 under the name Nibs and rebranded as Matt's under owner Matt Bristol the same year; the bar puts the sandwich on the menu in that period without the i, and Bristol's house line was that customer demand grew so quickly the bar forgot to add the letter and the spelling stuck. The 5-8 Club Tavern and Grill three miles south at 58th Street and Cedar opened in 1928 as a Prohibition speakeasy with a subterranean garage under the house for hauling liquor, ran as a restaurant after Repeal, and added its own version in the 1950s with the i kept in place. The Matt's spelling is Jucy. The 5-8 spelling is Juicy. Each insists on its spelling on its menu, on its merchandise, and on the merits, and a regular orders by the spelling and means the bar. The 5-8 Club broadens the question at the order screen by offering blue, pepper jack, Swiss, and American as four options, where Matt's serves American only.

The variations stay inside the sealed-patty premise and almost all of them change the slug at the core. A pepper-jack reading turns the geyser hot at the back of the mouth. A blue-cheese reading runs a salty fermented blast into the meat. A jalapeño-and-pepper-jack stuffing builds two ingredients into the seal and complicates the crimp. A bacon-and-cheddar stuffing edges the build toward an inside-out bacon cheeseburger. None of those builds dislodges the American-cheese reading from the Cedar Avenue bars that named the form. The wider American burger family includes nearby cousins built around a melted slice rather than a sealed core, the smashed Oklahoma onion style, the steamed cheeseburger of Connecticut, the bacon cheeseburger, and the patty melt; each runs a different relationship between the cheese and the heat and each is documented under its own slug.

Origin and history

Matt's Bar at 3500 Cedar Avenue South opened in 1954 under the previous bar name Nibs and rebranded as Matt's under new owner Matt Bristol that same year. The house origin story for the build: a regular customer at the bar in the first months after the rebrand asked Bristol to put a slice of American in between two patties rather than on top. Bristol cooked it, the customer bit in and was sprayed with molten dairy, and the customer exclaimed that's one juicy Lucy. Bristol put the build on the menu under the spelling Jucy Lucy without the i, which he later said was a clerical slip he never corrected. The story is the bar's own and is repeated on Matt's printed menu and on the bar's website.

The 5-8 Club at 5800 Cedar Avenue South opened in 1928 during the United States Prohibition era of 1920 to 1933 as a stucco-sided speakeasy in a then-non-urbanized stretch of south Minneapolis, with a subterranean garage built below the house for hauling barrel liquor. The bar continued as a tavern after Repeal in 1933 and added its own version of the sandwich in the 1950s under the spelling Juicy Lucy with the i kept. The 5-8 Club does not claim a specific founder for its version of the burger and credits the form to the broader south Minneapolis bar scene of the decade. Whether Matt's or the 5-8 invented the build first is not settled by any contemporary record and is the subject of a standing local feud.

The sandwich gained national attention through the 2000s and 2010s in food television features and travel coverage; Matt's Bar served the build to President Barack Obama during a campaign stop in June 2014. Matt's Bar at 3500 Cedar Avenue South in Minneapolis has cooked the Jucy Lucy on the same flat-tops since 1954, and the 5-8 Club at 5800 Cedar Avenue has cooked the Juicy Lucy since the 1950s as well; the two bars sit three miles apart on the same street and have spelled the burger differently for over six decades.