Da King of Beef

SUN CITY – With all due respect, the Italian beef is a mess.

There’s just no way to avoid it: the meat is drenched in au jus and piled high atop an already soaked bun. Add to that (if you so choose) greasy hot or sweet peppers and you’ve got a sandwich made to stain shirts and destroy even the toughest napkins.

If there was one man who could have tamed this beefy beast, it was Tony Ozzauto. The man built Chicago favorite Mr. Beef’s reputation on its clean atmosphere – no greasy door handles or black abyss toilet bowls in his beef stand, just top-quality sirloin beef cooked the way his mother made it.

In 1966, A young Ozzauto was working at Scala Packing Company, a meat supplier for various restaurants across the city. Ozzauto’s boss at Scala owned a nearby restaurant on 666 N. Orleans St., but did not like the way the managers handled their business. He sent Ozzauto to work at the store and in short time, Ozzauto was running Mr. Beef.

Get ’em talking

No scholar of business, Ozzauto was about to learn his first of many on-the-fly business lessons: to get people in, you have to get them talking. Christmas was approaching and Ozzauto was giving a special gift to every customer who walked through the doors: a box of chocolate-covered cherries, wrapped by his wife Annette. The couple is still going strong, having just celebrated their 54th anniversary this month.

In six months, Mr. Beef had become a lunch staple. At its peak, the stand was selling five to 600 sandwiches per day, with over 450 pounds of beef being cooked between the stand and sandwiches delivered to ArlingtonPark racetrack.

“There’s nobody that does this the way I did today,” Ozzauto said of his process.

Keep it clean

None of Ozzauto’s contemporaries did things his way either. In a world before strict sanitation laws, Mr. Beef was a model for how the future restaurant would operate.

Instinctively, Ozzauto set rules for employees like requiring them to wash their hands after using the restroom and not allowing food preparers to handle money. He also took measures like wrapping up meats after they were cooked and cooled to avoid bacteria.

“Nobody knew about what I was doing, I didn’t even know what I was doing,” he said. “I wasn’t making cross-contamination, which I would learn later when I went to school.”

Ozzauto told the story of a state restaurant inspector who frequented Mr. Beef – for a good reason.

“He used to bring people in, take them in my place, move my charcoal broiler and let them rub their hand underneath it like that [to] see if there was any grease,” he said. “It was a dumpy looking place, but it was immaculate.”

Keep it simple, and respect the beef

Mr. Beef’s success was also due to Ozzauto putting that attention to detail into the food he was making. Only the top quality sirloin went into his sandwiches.

“It’s very simple; you use good meat – sirloin, salt, pepper, oregano, chili pepper, and garlic juice,” he said. “You brown the meat and you put all that in there, put a little water and let it boil for three hours.”

The lengthy process of preparing beef is why Ozzauto calls Mr. Beef anything but fast food.

“The prep work behind it isn’t fast; it takes four hours to cook beef, it takes half a day to slice beef,” he said.

Few changes have come to Mr. Beef over the years, and even fewer have stuck. Ozzauto tried and got rid of a rotisserie cooker and scrapped hot dogs off the menu because the various ways customers could order the toppings were “too complicated.”

Keep your friends close, and your franchisees closer

Cemented in its status as a Chicago institution, Mr. Beef attracted local celebrities (Jesse White, playmates from the then-nearby PlayboyMansion) and out-of-towners (Jay Leno, who performed in Chicago before earning the “Tonight Show” gig, would come in regularly for a beef. Ozzauto fondly remembered comedy duo Allen and Rossi, who were opening for Frank Sinatra at the time, dropping in during a Chicago stop and putting on smocks to make their own sandwiches.

Other personalities have made their mark on Mr. Beef. Ozzauto recalled one Chicago newsman ordering a combo (Italian beef and Italian sausage) and eating it on the road. The sandwich nearly caused him to hit a pedestrian while driving.

“The next day [he] came in and said ‘man that’s a killer combo you gave me yesterday, I almost got killed,'” Ozzauto said.

And thus, the killer combo was named.

Everything in Chicago wants to be crowned the city’s best: the best pizza, hotel, laundromat, – you name it. Italian beef is no exception, but the beef market is not as cutthroat as it may seem. Ozzauto’s camaraderie with fellow beef godfathers like Dick Portillo goes back to the ’60s. Johnnie’s Beef, for example, still uses Scala meats today.

“It was all loyalty in those days, you made an agreement with people,” Ozzauto said.

Ozzauto was never against expansion, but wanted to make sure any place flying the Mr. Beef flag was offering a quality product. Today, several restaurants carry the Mr. Beef name and Ozzauto ensured each of them carried Scala meats to maintain consistent quality. More recently, Mr. Beef expanded west, bringing WindyCity heartiness to California’s sun-kissed beaches.

When the apple’s ripe…

As it would turn out, running a busy restaurant which required daily tastings of beef, sausage, and bread, inhaling customers’ constant smoke and charcoal grill fumes, and standing on a concrete floor for several hours daily through a couple of decades is not a healthy lifestyle.

The cost of  business for Ozzauto: high cholesterol and two open-heart surgeries. This was enough to cause him to step away from Mr. Beef, selling the business in 1980 at 45 years old, but keeping the property until 1995.

“Like my grandfather used to say, you pick the apple off the tree when it’s ripe,” he said. “And I sold the place when it was ripe, when it was doing business.”

Ozzauto stayed on for a month to ensure the new owners carried on his legacy of quality. With Mr. Beef as busy today as ever, he’s convinced they have.

Ozzauto’s post-Mr. Beef career looked very similar to his career before it. He went back to Scala as a manager, then worked with a food supplier using his first learned skill: debt collection.

Today, Ozzauto does his cooking in his Sun City kitchen and for Heritage Woods of Huntley, where he volunteers to make Italian specialties like marinara and Bolognese sauces.

Ozzauto is appalled by modern processes of jacquarding, or injecting beef with protein-based liquids, and shrink-wrapping, which he said has led to lower-quality meat.

“You’re not tasting what we used to taste in the ’70s and ’80s,” he said.

Still, Ozzauto ­- who has never eaten a McDonald’s hamburger – remains proud of taking no shortcuts, something guests at Mr. Beef and those at Heritage Woods can taste.

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