au jus – Michael Eats

Location: 707 Dundas Street West, Toronto
Website: https://www.marqsbeef.ca/

If you’re looking for a tasty, beefy sandwich, look no further: you’ve found it. Go to Marq’s and thank me later.

As the name implies, Marq’s serves Chicago-style Italian beef sandwiches, which features a whole bunch of roast beef on a French roll, served with a beefy au jus sauce (which, unlike a French dip, is incorporated right into the sandwich).

The sandwich is served as saucy as you like it: either juiced, dipped, or dunked, with dipped being the default level. You can further customize your sandwich with giardiniera (spicy pickled veggies) or sweet peppers, or if you want to really live it up, both.

I got the sandwich dipped with both, and it was extremely tasty. It’s exactly what you want it to be — the beef has a great flavour, it’s super tender, and the sauce-soaked bread is the perfect vehicle. That’s not to mention the zingy giardiniera, which does a great job of adding some brightness to the very heavy sandwich.

There’s not much else to say about it — it’s a great sandwich. There’s a whole lot I liked about it, and nothing that I didn’t.

Location: All over the place (check their Twitter account)
Website: https://www.facebook.com/hogtownsmoke

Over the last few years, Toronto’s food truck scene has gone from a handful of trucks selling stuff like hot dogs and fries to something much, much more interesting (there are enough to necessitate a website like this one to keep track of them). It’s certainly been a welcome phenomenon, and has made events like the recent Woofstock much more interesting, food-wise.

On this particular day, Hogtown Smoke had a few interesting looking items on their menu, though I decided to go with the Brisket Po Boy. The sandwich featured a fairly substantial amount of brisket dipped in au jus sauce, cheese, onions (which I honestly couldn’t even taste), and horseradish aioli.

It was a perfectly tasty sandwich, though I kinda wish I had just gone with the plain brisket. Good brisket is hard to prepare; it has the tendency to be a bit dry and tough, but this was moist, with just the right amount of fattiness and a nicely subtle smokey flavour. It was good enough that the other stuff felt more like a distraction than anything else; with brisket this good, all you really need is meat and bread, with maybe a little bit of barbecue sauce for flavour. There were a lot of flavours going on in this sandwich, and ultimately they just took away from the brisket.

The bread was perfect po boy bread — lightly crispy on the outside and soft and fluffy on the inside. The whole thing was pretty good, but I’ll definitely be going for the plain brisket if I ever find myself back in the vicinity of this truck.

Tag: au jus

Delicious, Beefy Sandwiches at Marq’s Chicago Beef

Hogtown Smoke