FOOD&DINING
Carol Deptolla
Top Corned Beef on the southwest side ticked all the boxes for me, a fussy dining critic who’s particular about her corned beef: It has to be sliced by hand. It has to be served warm. It has to be moist and flavorful. Related to moist and flavorful: There has to be some fat — there really does — and it has to melt in the mouth. Luscious or bust.
Top Corned Beef makes the kind of corned beef sandwich that I think about wistfully the next day. (After that sandwich, I wasn’t surprised its pastrami and Italian beef sandwiches are craveable, too.)
The chef who operates Top Corned Beef, Ricky Means, is a kindred corned beef spirit. “I like it to be a nice blend of meat and fat. And I like it to be chunky. That’s the way I like it,” he said, lots of meat, lots of flavor. Served on light rye, the classic corned beef also gets a shake of paprika across the top.
Means takes a couple of unorthodox approaches to making his corned beef.
“Most people boil the corned beef or they steam it, slow cook it. It may sound weird, but I actually fry it. It’s at a lower temperature, and it’s still a long process. It doesn’t really speed it up,” he said. But “somehow, it locks in the flavor.”
He does buy the brisket already cured, but he soaks it in an unexpected marinade before preparing it.
Means knows of a deli in Chicago that marinates its corned beef in orange soda. He didn’t want to go quite that route, so he landed on Dr Pepper.
“I figured I couldn’t go wrong with the 23 flavors,” he said.
The corned beef is done so well, I almost couldn’t believe it when Means told me he had no idea what kind of restaurant he would open when he signed the lease in late February 2020 — about two weeks before the pandemic lockdown of restaurants and bars on March 16.
He drove around the area to see what kinds of restaurants the neighborhood had.