It makes up half of the shop's sales (to keep up with demand, Kelsey roasts 200 pounds of beef every week.) It brings customers in from Worcester. It's widely considered the best roast beef sandwich in town—and Boston is a roast beef sandwich kinda town. We're talking Cutty's Roast Beef 1,000. More

The roast beef sandwich ($9) at Darwin Cafe is piled high on thickly-cut, toasty and charred slices of sourdough, made brilliant by a rich combination of sweet corn aioli and cherry tomato jam. Sweet, creamy, and bursting with flavor, every bite declares "it's still summertime." Darwin, a pocket-sized cafe tucked away on Ritch Alley in SOMA, changes up their sandwiches every few months (hence the delicious seasonality). More

Ever since I tried the Angus Snack Wrap at McDonald's I haven't been able to hear "Angus" without cringing. This past week, roast beef chain Arby's unveiled an Angus roast beef on a sandwich it calls the Angus Three Cheese and Bacon. I had high hopes it'd be able to wipe away all memory of the Snack Wrap in my mind. More

To add flavor to this mild cut of beef, the cooks began with a simple technique that worked wonders: salting the tenderloin before roasting. And when searing the meat first resulted in unevenly cooked, gray meat, they found the trick was to reverse the process, roasting the meat first and then searing it on the stovetop. What it gave them was a roast with uniformly pink meat, a deep brown crust, and strong beefy flavor—a beef tenderloin worthy of its price tag. Watch this video for step-by-step instructions or get the recipe at America's Test Kitchen (free registration required). More

The second most popular food in Buffalo, after the wings of course, is the beef on weck. It's comprised of three parts: the bread, the meat, and the horseradish. If any one of those components is off, the entire sandwich suffers. The kimmelweck roll, or 'weck for short, should be flecked with enough caraway seeds and salt crystals that you hardly need to season the beef since so much flavor power comes from the bread. The beef should be juicy and pinkish in the middle, with browned edges. Extra points if a guy in a white butcher's coat is carving it. And the horseradish—fresh, grated into mini shreds, and potent. We drove around the Buffalo area this week and made four beef on weck stops, looking for the best. And we found it. More

If you want world-class lobster rolls, perfect steamers, impeccable fresh-shucked oysters, or an enclave of the best Sichuan restaurants on the east coast, Boston is your town. But unlike, say, New York with its Reuben, Philly with its cheesesteak, or Chicago with its Italian Beef, Boston doesn't have a signature sandwich. Until now, that is. When I first heard that Charles Kelsey and his wife Rachel Toomey—both Cook's Illustrated alums—were going to turn the obsessive, perfection-bent mindset of the magazine into producing the best sandwiches, I knew that something serious was going to happen: Boston would finally get a world-class sandwich joint. More

Photograph from *reesie on Flickr There is something great about eating by the ocean, and there aren't many better ocean-side sandwich shacks than the original Kelly's Roast Beef on Revere Beach, ten miles north of Boston. It has everything you'd expect a seaside New England food shack to have—Lobster roll, fried seafood, hot dogs, etc. —but as the name suggests, the —roast beef sandwich is the star. There are two sizes—small and large—but the only difference between them is the amount of roast beef that Kelly's piles on. Either way, you end up with a generous amount of thinly sliced, rare roast beef, so much so that the sizes could easily be renamed "a good amount of beef" and... More