Roast Beef Sandwich

The roast beef sandwich is sliced roast beef in bread, and the version worth a score of its own is the North Shore roast beef of Massachusetts: a mound of rare, thinly sliced top round piled warm onto a toasted onion roll and dressed "three-way" with James River barbecue sauce, mayonnaise and a slice of American cheese. The style grew out of Kelly's Roast Beef on Revere Beach, which opened in 1951, and spread through the towns north of Boston, where dozens of stands sell little else. It is one of several regional roast beef sandwiches in the United States, alongside the Chicago Italian beef, the French dip of Los Angeles and the beef on weck of Buffalo, and it is distinguished from all of them by the rareness of the meat and the sweet, thin sauce. The cold deli roast beef sandwich with lettuce, tomato and horseradish is a different and lesser thing, and a British roast beef sandwich with mustard is a third.