Three-Way Roast Beef

Walk into a Salem beef house at lunch and the counter shorthand is one word and a number. A large three-way gets a rare beef sandwich with cheese, mayo, and James River barbecue sauce on a grilled onion roll. A small two-way gets the same build minus the cheese. A one-way gets the sauce alone. The counter argument is not what is in the sandwich; the beef and the roll are assumed and the only thing the cook needs to know is which of three accents you want. The number is the order. Most regulars say three.

The three accents do not duplicate. Cain's Extra Heavy mayonnaise is the fat, applied to the top of the roll in a heavy smear because the rare beef is too lean to carry the chew on its own. White American cheese is the binder and the salt, laid against the bottom bun and half-melted by the heat off the warm pile so it tacks the loose meat to the bread rather than letting the stack slide on the lift. The James River sauce is the acid line, a thin Carolina-influenced sweet-vinegar style closer to ketchup than to molasses, threaded into the folds of the meat rather than poured over the top. Each is in a different register. The combination is what the order language is asking after.

The beef is the constant under the count. Top round is slow-roasted to rare in a low oven, rested, sliced paper-thin on a Berkel slicer the moment before the sandwich is built, and piled high and loose on the bottom bun in airy ruffles rather than pressed sheets. That loose pile is what lets the cheese stick, the sauce thread through the folds, and the mayo lubricate the bite. A pressed-flat slab of the same beef would refuse all three condiments and read as cold leather. The slicer is the central piece of equipment in the room; on a busy Saturday at Bill and Bob's in Salem the machine runs continuously for six hours and a small pile of beef trim builds at the operator's elbow.

Each part has a way it can ruin the sandwich. Beef sliced too thick ropes between the bread and breaks the airy chew that makes the whole structure work. Mayo applied to the bottom bun instead of the top sogs the bread under the weight of the warm meat. Cheese laid on top of the beef rather than under it never melts properly and slides off in the foil. The onion roll has to be split, brushed with butter, and toasted face-down on the flat-top long enough to set a brown crust on the cut side but not so long the crumb dries out, because a dry roll cannot carry a high pile of beef without crumbling on the bite. The James River sauce is the easiest piece to overdo: a single spoon threaded through the meat reads bright and clean, while a heavy pour drowns the cheese and turns the back half of the sandwich into a wet bowl.

The cook lifts the roll off the flat-top and the kitchen smells like onion roll char and warm rare beef in one breath. The mayo goes on the top half cold and stays cold. The piled meat goes on hot off the slicer with the cheese laid first against the bottom bun, and the cheese starts to slacken before the sandwich closes. The first bite breaks through grilled bread to find the heavy, sweet mayonnaise, then the rare meat in fat warm folds, then the half-melted American cheese sliding against the lower crust. The James River sauce arrives a beat behind the meat as a thin sweet-vinegar pulse and clears the palate ahead of the next bite.

The variants are mostly the counts and the shop signatures. A super beef scales the meat pile and is the headline at most counters; a chicken or pastrami three-way swaps the protein and keeps the order language; a plain beef on a roll strips the condiments back to the meat alone. The closest siblings are the Buffalo beef on weck, which runs the same rare thin-sliced beef on a caraway-and-salt roll with horseradish and jus and a fundamentally different finish, and the chain roast beef of Arby's, which flattened the lean-rare-beef idea into a national drive-through without the counted-condiment grammar. Each deserves its own treatment.

Origin and history

The sandwich began as a beachside accident. Kelly's Roast Beef opened as a hot dog and seafood stand on Revere Beach Boulevard in 1951, run by Frank V. McCarthy and Raymond Carey. A whole roast beef left over from a canceled wedding at the banquet hall next door was sliced thin and put on grilled rolls that afternoon as a use-it-up special. The first batch sold out in under an hour. Kelly's added the sandwich to the menu the following week, and the format spread up the coast into Lynn, Salem, Beverly, and Peabody through the 1950s and 1960s as competing beef houses opened.

The three-way nomenclature itself is credited to Bill and Bob's Roast Beef on Loring Avenue in Salem, where the owner Nondas Lagonakis assembled the cheese-mayo-barbecue trio in the late 1960s and named the order language that codified it. Lagonakis is also credited with helping develop the local recipe for James River barbecue sauce, which is now produced in volume by Cattlemen's and other commercial sauce makers but originated as a counter-built blend on the North Shore. Bill and Bob's continues to use the same trio and the same order language as the operating standard in 2026.

Kelly's never adopted the onion roll or the three-way order language and remains the outlier among the major shops, building its standard roast beef on a sesame seed bun with mayo, cheese, and barbecue sauce listed individually rather than as a count. Nondas Lagonakis opened the Salem shop on Loring Avenue in 1968, and the three-way order language entered the North Shore vernacular from that counter.