What Cut of Beef Do Steak Tips Come From?

We spoke with two dozen chefs, culinary historians, and butchers to get to the bottom (sirloin) of it.

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It’s just before 8 p. m. Wednesday, and I’m at a restaurant north of Boston that could be any sports bar and “grille” in New England. “It’s a quiet night, and the bar is less crowded than I thought it would be. A game is on TV, playing in the background as I feel a strong wave of nostalgia coming over me.” I take out a gold-wrapped stick of butter and try to spread it on a plain piece of white bread without any luck. Soon, after I burn my fingers by ripping the aluminum foil off of a second pat, I’ll let it melt onto my already-very-hot baked potato. Mediocre bread and singed fingertips be damned: It’s all part of the experience.

The server arrives—you know the type. She’s been working here for a long time, speaks with a Boston accent, and calls you “hon.” She’s carrying a white plate full of beef that has been cut into chunks about three or four bites wide. The meat is shiny from the marinade and has char marks from being on the grill. A small bowl on the side has round cherry peppers in it. Some are bright red, some are olive green, and all of them have a surprising bite. Still, they’re just the supporting characters: I’m here for the steak tips.

There’s a knife, but it’s hardly necessary. You only need to take one bite of the sweet and smoky beef marinated in a sauce to remember simple summer dinners cooked on a patio grill and served with rice pilaf. For others, it might be tailgating, family cookouts, or nights out at a restaurant like this one. If you’re a New Englander, you know this steak. One thing I’ve learned from talking about steak tips a lot lately is that most people from outside the area have never heard of them, and many people who live here don’t know that they’re a dish that’s only found in this part of the country. Which raises the question: What even is a steak tip, anyway?.

Further reading:

First, there’s the cut of meat to consider. For some, that part is easy: “The only New England steak tip is sirloin flap meat,” says Tom Doyle, co-owner of Alpine Butcher in Lowell, which has been around for 100 years and is run by his fourth-generation family. “Nothing else is it. He says that the cut, which is in the bottom sirloin near the cow’s flank, used to be seen as undesirable and was usually used for stew beef or ground meat. At high-end steakhouses, you’ll almost never find steak tips on the menu, but some serve flap meat with the fancy-sounding name “bavette,” usually in the form of steak frites. Others say multiple cuts of meat can be considered a steak tip. “Anything they want to cube and marinate,” says Ron Savenor, owner of Savenor’s Butcher. “People have used flap meat, peeled knuckles, tri-tips.” Hanger steak is another good tip candidate, notes Maggi Healey, who works for the meat distributor T. F. Kinnealey & Co. Still, the best cut is flap meat, she says. “It’s sort of a fibrous meat, but it’s also tender. It’s very flavorful. ”.

Most butchers and chefs in New England agree that flap meat is the best cut, if not the only cut, for the job. It marinates really well, which is another important part of steak tips, whether you make a sweet barbecue sauce or a simple Italian dressing. This is thanks to its “long, loose grain,” says Michael Dulock, owner of the Somerville butcher shop M. F. Dulock Pasture-Raised Meats. One thing is for sure, though: whether you eat your tips at a dimly lit sports pub north of Boston or on your own grill, whether you put them on a sub and cover it in melted cheese or mix them with iceberg lettuce and call it a salad, you’re enjoying a real treat from the area. It’s actually steak tips that people in New England love more than Dunkin’ iced coffee in the dead of winter.

But who came up with them, where, and when? My search for answers took me from the hip sports bar NewBridge Cafe in Chelsea to the hallowed halls of Harvard University, where I read through more than a dozen fragile New England cookbooks from the 19th and 20th centuries and a big box full of meat pamphlets. Not only did I talk to chefs and restaurant owners of both fancy and casual types, but I also talked to meat distributors, butchers, and food historians who specialize in New England food. I ate more beef in the span of a few weeks than could ever be advisable. And I did it all in a quest to discover exactly how this mysterious local tradition began.

People who know a lot about food in the area will all tell you the same thing: the steak tip’s rise in New England was definitely all about money. What’s the secret to making a bad piece of meat sell well? It turns out the secret is in the marketing (and maybe the marinade).

If you remember back to before steak tips, flap meat was a pain because butchers had to figure out what to do with it. One average-sized steer only gives about 6 pounds of the stuff, so most of the time it was put through the grinder to make hamburger meat, which “is the lowest-cost return on the animal other than bones or fat,” says Dulock, who runs his Somerville butcher shop with a “nose-to-tail” style. “That means you can get more money from that carcass if you can find something to do with it that people even like to eat.” ”.

Doyle has a similar take. He says that until the early 1970s, local butchers still bought whole sides of beef to cut up on the spot. This meant that they only got a few pounds of flap meat per steer. But around the middle of the 1970s, bigger slaughterhouses began processing the sides of beef on-site and sending individual cuts to butchers by the box. Then those big slaughterhouses had to figure out how to sell more of the less-desirable cuts of meat, like flap meat.

They did market it, and it worked! Flap meat could be sold as a cheap steak that’s good for grilling. By the 1980s, Doyle says, customers could readily buy sirloin flap meat from butchers and grocery stores. “Everything boils down to economics,” Dulock says. “At some point, someone was cutting beef, which wasn’t making them any money, and saw a chance to get more for it.” As New England food expert Lou Greenstein puts it, “a smart butcher asked, ‘What can I call this to turn this cow into a Cadillac?'”

That might explain the rise of flap meat on a larger scale, but what about New England steak tips in all their marinated, cherry pepper-topped glory? The timeline for how the tips were invented isn’t clear, and no one has claimed to have invented them, but I soon learned that there are a lot of theories.

I recently went to Harvard on a rainy morning to find out the real story of how the steak tip came to be. When I went to the Radcliffe Institute’s Schlesinger Library, which is known for having a large collection of old cookbooks, I wasn’t sure what I would find because an online search for “steak tips” and similar terms had come up almost empty a few days before. But I planned to spend about an hour looking through the archives for beef cooking trends over the centuries and looking for any possible steak-tip ancestors.

I put my things in a locker downstairs and then went to the reading room. There, a librarian brought over a cart full of the books I had asked for. While reading them, I did come across the term “sirloin tip” in Alice Bradley’s 1935 cookbook Six Hundred Suggestions for Serving Meat. Bradley was the principal of Miss Farmer’s School of Cookery in Boston. There were two sirloin tip ideas in between the sirloin roll and short-rib suggestions. One had mushroom sauce and baked tomatoes filled with green pepper and onions. The other had horseradish grated or shredded in lettuce leaves.

Bradley wrote about charcoal or coal-broiling meat later in the same book. On the same page, he also gave a short “meat en brochette” recipe for bacon or salt pork wrapped around meat that is grilled on steel skewers (more on that in a moment). Soon, though, I realized that I wasn’t going to find what I was looking for, even though the trip through the history of food had been interesting. After all, the steak tip’s origin story probably wasn’t hidden in musty cookbooks. It was likely to be found on old local restaurant menus.

The next day, I called Marc Sheehan, chef and co-owner of Northern Spy in Canton and a New England food history buff with a big collection of “weird old menus.” He did have an idea: steak tips were probably made when two popular 20th-century menu items came together. I was told that in the 1940s, a dish called beef en brochette, which means “beef on skewers,” was often served at nicer Boston restaurants. As early as the 1970s, the word “tips” began to show up more often in dish names, like “brochette of tenderloin tips” and “beef tips en brochette with rice pilaf.” Some of the en brochette dish descriptions even talk about marinades. For example, Hampshire House on Beacon Hill’s 1976 version says, “cubes of beef marinated in a special sauce, skewered with onion, peppers, tomatoes, and mushrooms and served on a bed of rice.” ” (Priced at $5. 95 at the time, if you want to feel a little depressed. ) But wait, doesn’t that sound like a kebab of some kind?.

Kebabs, indeed. There was a wave of Greek immigration to New England in the 1970s, and many Italian restaurant owners sold their businesses to the newcomers. This led to more pizzerias serving Greek food like kebabs and souvlaki, as well as New England Greek pizza. Sheehan said, “Kebabs and souvlaki are just steak tips.” He also said, “In an effort to appeal to the American palate,” restaurant owners may have started using Worcestershire sauce instead of a more Greek-style marinade made of lemon, garlic, and olive oil. The sauce’s sweet-tinged umami isn’t too far off from the sweet barbecue-style marinade we now know and love. Over time, Sheehan continued, the two dishes “naturally evolved” into the current iteration of steak tips. This is a very likely theory, but Sheehan did say that the origin stories of regional foods tend to follow a similar pattern. So how else might the modern steak tip have come to be?.

A parallel timeline most likely began at the 68-foot-tall cactus on Route 1 in Saugus, which is everyone’s favorite place to find New England steak tips. Many of the people I talked to thought Hilltop Steakhouse, which was once America’s highest-grossing restaurant, came up with the dish or at least made it popular. It makes sense, since the huge (and very popular) North Shore landmark, which was open from 1961 to 2013, was one of the first restaurants in Greater Boston to serve steak.

George Ravanis, who owns Frank’s Steak House in Cambridge and has been there since 1938, seems to believe that the Hilltop story is true. Harvanis said, “Hilltop killed their own meat and cut everything up. They found a use for the flap meat, which wasn’t used very often.” “Everything is done out of necessity. He said it was like when Ore-Ida made tater tots out of leftover potatoes from making French fries or when co-owner Teressa Bellissimo made Buffalo wings popular by deep-frying them and adding hot sauce.

I decided to go straight to the source after talking to Ravanis. Indeed, Gina Giuffrida, daughter of Hilltop founder Frank Giuffrida, confirmed that tips have been on the menu since the beginning. They were grilled but not marinated, served with fries, rice, or potato, and a “ginormous” salad, she said. She thinks that her father, who was born in 1917 and lived through the Great Depression, did make the steak tip after comparing notes with her mother, sister, and other family members. “He would never waste a cut of meat,” she said. “If there was something he could utilize, he utilized it. ” When the Hilltop Butcher Shop opened later in the 1960s, he sold the tips in 5-pound bags. “I know we were the first retail store to sell steak tips,” Giuffrida told me, “One hundred percent. ”.

Still, that doesn’t explain where the iconic marinade came into play. Several of my sources led me to the next place I should look into steak tips: a busy restaurant in a big brick building in Chelsea. The 1975-opened NewBridge Cafe still serves more than 1,000 pounds of some of the best tips in the area every week. Yet, when I talked to John Mandracchia, the restaurant’s second-generation co-owner, he wasn’t willing to take the credit. “I don’t think we originated it, but we’re pretty close to the beginning,” he said. His guess? The Ninety Nine restaurant, sometime in the 1960s.

According to lore at the Ninety Nine, whose first restaurant opened in 1952 in downtown Boston, the chain may have been the first place where the marinated tip, at least the Italian dressing kind, was made. Michael Giovine, who is in charge of marketing for Ninety Nine Restaurants, There, as legend has it, a cook accidentally knocked steak trimmings into a bowl of Italian dressing. Giovine said, “The staff decided to sell the marinated beef cuts as a special because they didn’t want to waste food that could be used.” “Guests loved them, and the rest is history. ”.

The time frame isn’t clear, but the Ninety Nine team showed me two menus with marinated tips: one from 1971 and one that wasn’t dated but was probably from before 1971 based on the number of locations on the back. For $4. 99, a person could get 9 ounces of “lightly marinated charcoal-baked beef tips” served on rice pilaf. (Giovine called the current marinade “a blend of spices in the Italian style” that gives the beef “a unique and robust flavor. Giovine doesn’t say that the Ninety Nine brought steak tips to New England, but he does say that “no brand has been more instrumental in making them the popular offering for the region.” ” Steak tips, she said, continue to be one of the chain’s most popular items.

The final step in the mysterious steak-tip timeline? Marinated tips sold to home cooks. Malden-based Dom’s Sausage Co. —the company that made “the official steak tip of the New England Patriots,” which might be the most New England-themed phrase ever—is at the top, if not the creator. Domenic Botticelli, Elizabeth Botticelli Fusco, and Melanie Botticelli Fusco are the third generation of owners of the business. Their grandfather Domenic started making sausages in the basement of his mother-in-law in 1936.

When Dom’s opened its current Malden storefront in the 1970s, steak tips weren’t in the picture just yet. Then, in the early 1980s, when the government stepped up its fight against cholesterol and saturated fat, Fusco says that second-generation owner Angelo “Buddy” Botticelli was eager to get people back to the meaty side. “He said, ‘Let’s get some beef and flavor it up and make it different. A friend of Botticelli’s who made sausage flavors came up with Dom’s original steak-tip marinade. It’s a secret recipe that boasts smoky and sweet caramel flavors.

At first, the Dom’s team marinated meat in big vats, bagging and weighing it to order. This method was messy and sticky, so they bought equipment to package the tips, which made it possible to make a lot of them. Today, Dom’s sells to more than 100 wholesalers and ships to customers nationwide. Elizabeth Botticelli, president of the company and director of shipping, says that people who live outside of New England are often the ones who order the tips from far away. “I get so many emails saying, ‘I need my Dom’s. ’ They say there are no steak tips in places like Florida or Idaho or California or Texas. ”.

No one really knows why steak tips have stayed close to New England all these years, but people who live there will fiercely defend them and promote their favorites. No matter which of the kebab/brochette or Hilltop/Ninety Nine/Dom’s theories is more likely to be true, the origin story is still a big, beefy question mark.

Still, in the end, maybe the when, where, and who matter less than the why. What is it about New Englanders that makes them love steak tips so much? Two words kept coming up in my conversations: “New Englanders are “frugal” and “New Englanders are “hardy.” “We’re drawn to meat because it shows making something useful—better than useful—out of something other people would throw away.” And yes, people in New England are happy to grill meat outside all year, even if they have to stand in a foot of snow. “I think in New England, people are hard-working,” Elizabeth Botticelli says. “We can be casual or fancy, and steak tips make a steak dinner feel less fancy.” Add a vegetable or potato to them to make them look better, or cover them in cheese and put them in a big sub roll for a quick and easy meal. ’ It’s a steak, and it’s a sandwich. You got a problem with that?”.

How to Break Down a Beef Sirloin

FAQ

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