French dip sandwich Period BOrigin theory CVerified

The French dip sandwich is thinly sliced roast beef in a French roll, served dipped in the meat juices (the jus). It is said to have been born in the early twentieth century, in the Los Angeles of the 1900s and 1910s. Both the beef and the bread had been on hand since the Old World, so nothing about the ingredients stood in the way of its making. What defines the dish is the manner of it—soaking the bread in the juices that ran off the roasted meat. The stage on which this plain treat entered the world was the delicatessens on street corners busy with working people.

The "French" in the name often leads people to assume the dish itself came from France. But the leading account holds that it refers not to the food's nationality but to the man said to have invented it, Philippe Mathieu, who was of French descent; the use of a French loaf may have been folded into the name as well. The story of how the name arose and the story of who invented the dish, and how, are best kept apart.

The origin of the French dip pits two Los Angeles establishments against each other, neither yielding over the years.

One is Philippe the Original. Its founder, Philippe Mathieu, is said to have started it when, while making a sandwich for a police officer (some say a firefighter), he accidentally dropped the bread into the pan of jus—or, in another telling, added the juices at a customer's request. Accounts of the year range from 1908 to 1918. The other is Cole's, opened in the same year, 1908, which claims the dish began when its cook, Jack Garlinghouse, softened a French roll in the jus for a customer with sore gums.

Neither anecdote has much contemporary record to support it directly. In the 2010s, an investigative report drew on a 1951 Los Angeles Times interview with Mathieu himself to argue for Philippe as the inventor. Cole's, for its part, has a weakness: across a century of newspapers, no mention ties Cole's to the French dip. That does not amount to refuting the Cole's claim, either. With no positive evidence to lean on, the rivalry between the two remains unsettled to this day.