Sliced Beef on Garlic Bread

A St. Louis deli takes a split length of Italian bread, paints the cut face with garlic butter, lays on thin-sliced roast beef and a blanket of Provel, dusts the top with paprika, and slides the whole open-faced thing under a broiler until the cheese slumps and the edges of the bread crisp. The carrier is garlic bread, which is the move that separates this from every other warm roast beef in the country. The bread is not a neutral roll waiting to be filled; it is seasoned, buttered, and toasted before the beef ever touches it, so the loaf reads as a flavor in the sandwich instead of a container for one.

Order it in St. Louis and you are standing where two named local sandwiches cross. One is the Gerber, the 1973 garlic-bread-and-Provel melt built around ham. The other is older and built around beef: the Prosperity, an open-faced hot roast beef the city has served since the 1920s, usually with gravy poured over the top. The roast-beef-on-garlic-bread reading borrows the Gerber's broiled, buttered loaf and the Prosperity's warm sliced beef, and it lives on the same menus that gave both their names. At Ruma's Deli, the family that put the Gerber in print, you can order half a Gerber and half a Prosperity on one board, the ham version and the beef version of the same garlic-bread idea side by side.

Provel is what holds the beef reading together. It is a St. Louis processed blend of cheddar, Swiss, and provolone with liquid smoke worked in, engineered to a low melting point so it flows into a smooth slack layer rather than stretching into strings. Melted onto thin roast beef, it coats the slices the way a gravy would, which is part of why the build slides so easily toward its Prosperity ancestor: a few shops skip the cheese-as-binder approach entirely and ladle warm jus over the open face instead, leaning on the gravy the older sandwich always used. Either way the beef has to be shaved and warmed rather than thick and broiled, or it dries to rope under the heat before the cheese has a chance to go slack.

It comes out of the broiler open-faced and steaming, a fork sandwich as much as a hand one, the cheese too molten and the bread too hot to lift clean. The smell is garlic and toasted butter first, the beef and the smoke of the Provel arriving under it. The top is blistered where the paprika caught the heat, the garlic crust crackling at the edge of the bite and going pliant toward the center where the butter soaked in. It eats hot and unified, the kind of thing a St. Louis counter calls when a plain roast beef on a bun would feel too quiet for the room.

The shop decides which ancestor wins. Lean on the Provel and paprika and it is a Gerber wearing beef. Pour the gravy and it is a Prosperity built on garlic bread. Most versions split the difference, broiled and cheesed but happy to take a side of jus, which is why the same plate can read as two sandwiches depending on who is asking.

The Gerber, the Prosperity, and a beef in between

The garlic-bread half of the lineage has a date. The Gerber sandwich went on the menu at Ruma's Deli in St. Louis in 1973, named the Gerber Special after Dick Gerber, a tire-shop owner whose store sat next to the deli in the Covington Manor strip center. By most accounts he paid the Rumas a small fee to build his own sandwich, a half-section of Italian or French bread with garlic butter, meat, cheese, and paprika, toasted open-faced. The first ones reportedly used provolone; the Provel that defines the canonical Gerber today came in as the city's house cheese took over. Roast beef is the standard meat swap, and Ruma's lists its own beef-and-gravy version as the Prosperity.

That name reaches back much further than 1973. The Prosperity sandwich was an open-faced hot sandwich associated with the Mayfair Hotel in downtown St. Louis in the late 1920s, a local answer to the Kentucky Hot Brown, and the story holds that it was named for the era's stubborn promise that prosperity was just around the corner before the Depression arrived. The early hotel version layered ham and turkey under a cheese sauce; the form that survived in St. Louis delis is the roast-beef one, sliced thin and sauced, which is the build a customer means when they ask for beef on the Gerber's garlic bread.

The cheese predates the garlic-bread sandwich by a generation either way. Provel was developed for St. Louis-style pizza in the 1940s, with the trademark application filed in June 1947 and the name registered by 1950. The city built a whole local palate around its low-melt clean bite, and when the Gerber arrived in 1973 it inherited a cheese the rest of the country had never tasted. The beef reading sits at the meeting of all three: a Depression-era roast beef, a postwar cheese, and a 1970s garlic-bread melt, plated as one hot open-faced thing.