I work in Lakeville, where quick lunchtime dining options are fairly limited. Once you've run the gamut of sandwich, pizza, and fast food chains, you need to break the monotony now and then with a sit-down restaurant. Babe's is on our list of such destinations. It's not terribly far from our office, but unfortunately it seems like their service is a little spotty. Sometimes it's spot on, and other times it seemed to take forever to get our food, or they screw up the orders. On one visit, they brought out completely wrong dishes for two of the three people in our party. To their credit, they were more than willing to prepare new orders (though we opted to eat what was served to us so we could get back to work), and took a good portion of those meals off of our tab.

So why do we keep going back? Honestly, the food is good, and their lunch special prices are quite reasonable. Plus, I've slowly been working my way toward trying a curiously named sandwich called the Hot Beef Commercial. Apparently this sandwich, or at least the name for it, is a Minnesota thing, though none of my Minnesota-born coworkers had heard of it. Only one of my friends was familiar with it from her days as a waitress. Basically it's a hot beef sandwich smothered in mashed potatoes and gravy. I still have no idea why it's called a Hot Beef Commercial, however. Sounds like an advertisement for a gay chat line or commercial-grade heated cow meat.

Description of a Hot Beef Commercial on the Babe's menu.


Now I figured as much, but for as unusual as the name is, the sandwich really was quite delicious. Beef, gravy, and potatoes are pretty iffy dishes for a lot of restaurants. Some joints have mashed potatoes that taste like they're made from flakes, overcooked or chewy beef, and gravy that tastes like it was made in a school cafeteria the day before. But Babe's dropped a tasty HBC on my ass. The bread was perfectly light and fluffy, but robust enough not to turn into a flat, soggy mess when soaked in gravy, which itself was thick, smooth, and flavorful. The beef was tender and moist, and the mashed potatoes were whipped to the right consistency and clearly made with real potatoes.





That, my friend, is one hot beef!


I give the $6.99 Hot Beef Commercial at Babe's a whimsical thumbs up.