The Regional Maryland BBQ That Turns Roast Beef Into A Smoky Dream

Across the United States, especially in the South, you'll find many different styles of BBQ. While Kansas City, Memphis, Texas, and the Carolinas have some of the best-known varieties of smoked meats and barbecue sauces to smother them in, plenty of other regions have their own smoky, meaty delights to discover. Anyone spending time in Maryland knows that they have to visit one of the state's many renowned crab shacks, but there's another state specialty that will especially appeal to the carnivores and charcoal enthusiasts: pit beef.

You can think of pit beef as a sort of crossover between roast beef and brisket. Like roast beef, pit beef is usually made from top or bottom round, cooked medium-rare, and sliced thin without any heavy marinades. Where it differs, however, is in cooking methodology. While roast beef is typically prepared by cooking low and slow in the oven, pit beef is cooked quickly on a very hot charcoal grill. The resulting beef roast has a nice crust, a juicy interior, and is served super-thinly sliced on a Kaiser roll with onions and horseradish or a seasoned, typically mayo-based horseradish condiment colloquially referred to as "tiger sauce." You can find pit beef restaurants and stands throughout the greater Baltimore area, with local standouts like Chaps and Pioneer Pit Beef reaching legendary status.

Baltimore might be best known for crab, but pit beef has made a serious cultural mark. It's even featured in an episode of "The Wire," where a character is convinced to confess to violent crimes through the persuasive power of a pit beef sandwich. Given its iconic status and the myriad restaurants serving these sandwiches throughout the region, you might expect it to have long-established historical roots. As far as anyone can tell, however, pit beef didn't emerge as a Maryland specialty until the 1970s, when stands started springing up around Pulaski Highway to sling the thinly sliced beef.

In a 2015 article for the Baltimore Sun, food journalist Richard Gorelick found that, while pit beef was first mentioned in the newspaper's archive in 1968, it wasn't until the early '90s that it was lauded as a delicacy for proud locals to claim as their own. Chaps, one of the city's most famous pit beef restaurants, started as a stand outside of a nightclub in 1987 and still operates out of an expanded version of its original Pulaski Highway shack.

There's plenty of debate over whether pit beef counts as barbecue, since it's grilled rather than slow-cooked. Disagreement also abounds over the most authentic way to serve pit beef sandwiches: is it on a Kaiser roll or white bread? Do you douse it in tiger sauce or pure horseradish? But no matter what you call it or how you serve it, pit beef is a regionally celebrated meat worth tasting.