Notable Sandwiches #97: Jucy Lucy
By David Swanson
Welcome back to Notable Sandwiches, the feature where Talia and I stumble our way through the strange and mutable document that is Wikipedia’s List of Notable Sandwiches. This week, a Twin Cities icon: the Jucy (or Juicy) Lucy.
Really, it was inevitable that someone, somewhere, would think to stuff the cheese into of the middle of their burger rather than layering it on top. After all, we love to stuff our food with other food. Ancient Roman cookbooks tell of “Trojan Pig”, in which a whole wild hog is “made pregnant with other animals and enclosed within as the Trojan horse was made pregnant with armed men.” A favorite dish of the Inuit natives Greenland consisted of a seal carcass stuffed with sea birds. In 1807, a French cookbook by Alexandre-Balthazar-Laurent Grimod de La Reynière provided a recipe for the preposterous rôti sans pareil—the roast without equal: “a bustard stuffed with a turkey stuffed with a goose stuffed with a pheasant stuffed with a chicken stuffed with a duck stuffed with a guinea fowl stuffed with a teal stuffed with a woodcock stuffed with a partridge stuffed with a plover stuffed with a lapwing stuffed with a quail stuffed with a thrush stuffed with a lark stuffed with an ortolan bunting stuffed with a garden warbler stuffed with an olive stuffed with an anchovy stuffed with a single caper.” Every Thanksgiving we hear the legend of the turducken. Every morning we dream of pop tarts and jelly donuts.
Perhaps this primal desire for the thing within the thing explains the afternoon seventy years ago, when a regular at Matt’s Bar in South Minneapolis came in for his usual beer and cheeseburger. On this particular afternoon, however, he was bored with his usual order and asked owner Matt Bristol to try something a little different. "The whole story goes like this,” Matt’s daughter Cheryl Bristol told CityPages in 1998. “There was a bachelor customer who used to come in every day and order a burger. One day, in 1954, he told the cook to seal up some cheese in the middle. So the cook did, and when he bit into it the hot cheese spurted out, and he wiped his mouth and said, 'Oooh, that's one juicy lucy!'” An early misspelling stuck, and the “jucy” Lucy went up on the menu board.
"The Jucy Lucy is a concoction that I have described, with no fear of contradiction, as 'the ambrosia of burgerdom,'" wrote Minneapolis Star-Tribune columnist Dick Youngblood in 1998. "The mere aroma can add three or four pounds to my already elliptical contours. It is not a meal for the impatient, however; the burger's molten innards will scar the unwary neophyte—or the forgetful veteran—who attacks with wide-mouthed exuberance instead of nibbling warily at the edges." Matt’s looks much the same as it did seven decades ago, a bog-standard midwestern dive, with a battered jukebox in the back and a tiny, extravagantly-seasoned grill behind the bar. It’s a fitting spot for the birth of a local blue-collar legend.
Unless, of course, that legend was born a few miles south of Matt’s, down near the airport at the 5-8 Club, where the regulars insist the Juicy Lucy was really invented. We’ve covered this kind of local food rivalry in previous Notable Sandwich columns: Pat’s and Geno’s battling for the crown of King of the Philly Cheesesteak; Cole's vs. Philippe in LA’s French Dip wars. It’s an old story, but Minnesota nice is a real thing, and this particular rivalry seems to be a warm, if not molten, one. "That they exist and we exist is good for both of us," Jill Skogheim of 5-8 told the Star-Tribune in 2017. (For what it’s worth, both my paternal grandfather and maternal grandmother grew up in Minnesota, my father was born in Minneapolis not too long before the Jucy Lucy, and I spent my childhood visiting the Twin Cities and Lake Minnetonka for family reunions. In other words, I know from Minnesota nice.)
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"The difference between St. Paul and Minneapolis,” noted Twin Cities evangelist Garrison Keillor, “is the difference between pumpernickel and Wonder Bread." I’m not quite sure what that means, but aesthetically, the difference between Matt’s and 5-8 is more like the difference between Moe’s Bar on the Simpsons and TGI Fridays. And the burgers? Matt’s keeps things simple: ground beef, salt and pepper, Kraft American cheese, grilled onions, and a pickle slice or two. At 5-8, which was founded as a speakeasy in the 1920s, the patty and roll are slightly larger, and diners have the option of gourmet cheeses, along with bacon, onion rings, barbecue sauce, and other exorbitant accoutrements. They even serve a popular version with peanut butter and jelly.
Thanks to Matt’s and the 5-8 Club, the Lucy is today as emblematic a Minnesota staple as the hotdish, Jell-O salad, or lutefisk, and any self-respecting dive bar or casual family eatery in the Twin Cities is likely serving them. At the Nook, in St. Paul, you can gorge yourself between bowling and skee-ball; at the Burmese-focused Mandalay Bay, the kitchen spices the patties with chapli and throws avocado into the equation; the Cajun Lucy at the Groveland Tap adds diced jalapeños to a pepper jack core; the Blue Door Pub hit the scene with a blue-cheese “Blucy”, and now serves a version with herbed goat cheese and blackberry sauce, and another with ghost pepper cheese, fried avocado, spicy bacon, and cilantro-lime sauce. At Wendy’s House of Soul, the Lucys come deep-fried. There are even vegan versions available throughout the city.
In January, the Minneapolis Fox affiliate produced a 30-minute documentary on the Jucy Lucy, capping a decade in which the burger has gone from local icon to national celebrity. When Barack Obama visited Minneapolis to launch a new White House initiative on the lives of everyday Americans in 2014, his first stop was Matt’s Bar, where he talked shop over a Jucy Lucy. In 2018, when Jimmy Fallon came to the city during Super Bowl LII, he filmed a segment at 5-8 Club. On a trip to the Twin Cities the year before, model and food influencer Chrissie Teigen asked her followers if she should go to 5-8 or the Nook to sample a Lucy; she was bombarded with replies before settling on an order from Matt’s. When Fargo season five star Lamorne Morris went on Drew Barrymore’s talk show, the pair discussed the Minnesota-based series between mouthfuls of Juicy Lucys. And on the occasion of Carlos Correa’s return to the Minnesota Twins last year, the prodigal star said the primary motivations were his son’s upbringing, and his appetite’s wellbeing. “Kylo is going to grow up to be Minnesota Nice, which I love, and we’re very excited,” Correa told the New York Times. “I get more Jucy Lucys, also.”
Thanks to the rise of food television and the growing currency of Instagram-worthy eats, the gospel of the stuffed burger has oozed out beyond the confines of the Twin Cities. In 2018, Thrillist included the Jucy Lucy on its list of the 101 dishes that changed America. But despite my own fairly deep roots in the region, I’ve never tried its most iconic dish, an oversight which I can only attribute to misplaced parental priorities.
The truth is that—despite mankind’s love of stuffed foods, and all testimony to the wonders of the Lucy aside—the cheeseburger strikes me as an unimprovable food. (It’s also one that, for whatever reason, doesn’t warrant its own entry on the Notable Sandwich list, despite room for the chiliburger, the Luther, the patty melt, the slider… and, of course, the Jucy Lucy.) But if this particular preparation is such a revelation, why isn’t it on the menu of every fast-food joint from Spokane to St. Petersberg? I put it down to liability and reliability: you can't just sling molten cheese around without risking serious legal ramifications, and it’s not that easy a dish to consistently replicate.
According to burger lore, the moment when the beloved working-class sandwich received its gourmet glow up occurred in 2001, when Chef Daniel Boulud added the DB Burger to his menu; it featured a sirloin patty stuffed with braised short ribs, foie gras, and truffles. The result may not have been as outrageous as Grimod de La Reynière’s 17-layer rôti sans pareil from 1807, but it was still a sensation, igniting a gourmet burger arms race. I’ve had the DB, and while I have no regrets, I also know that the best burger has no need for gussying. The Jucy Lucy might be an exception, though—after all, aren’t the best things in life a bit cheesy on the inside? So the next time I make my way to the Twin Cities, a trip to Matt’s Bar will be at the top of my to-do list. Foie gras and truffles may work in Manhattan, but if you’re looking for the true “ambrosia of burgerdom” the only stuffed version you need is waiting for you in Minnesota. Nice.
