Chicago has Italian beef. New York has pizza. Boston has clam chowder. But here in central Illinois, the signature dish arrives buried beneath a blanket of cheese sauce. It’s called the horseshoe.
The open-faced sandwich is built on two thick slices of Texas toast, a hamburger patty, a mound of crinkle-cut fries, and smothered in a rich cheese sauce. Finishing one may leave you searching for the nearest hammock.
In Springfield, where train whistles regularly pierce the summer air along Route 66, the horseshoe is so ingrained in local culture that it’s served in many school cafeterias. But don’t be surprised if you’ve never heard of it.
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Compared with Kansas City barbecue or Nashville hot chicken, the signature dish of Springfield, Illinois, remains largely unknown. Here in the state capital, one restaurant serves nearly 1,000 “horseshoe” sandwiches a day.
“Nobody outside of Springfield knows about it. It’s kind of a hidden gem,” says Miranda Bailey-Peetz, communications director of the Illinois State Historical Society. “If you see a horseshoe out in the wild somewhere, you usually find that they’ve been brought by a transplant from central Illinois.”
Ms. Bailey-Peetz is a bit of a horseshoe evangelist. To ensure this out-of-town reporter experienced Springfield’s sandwich firsthand, she insisted on lunch at D’Arcy’s Pint, a local Irish pub that has won the Illinois Times’ “Best Horseshoe” award 27 times.
That’s no small feat. More than 30 restaurants along the Springfield Horseshoe Trail serve the dish, each with its own variations and closely guarded cheese sauce recipes.
Indeed, locals are divided over whether D’Arcy’s or neighboring Dublin Pub serves the better horseshoe. The Dublin offers three varieties of cheese with its sandwiches.
“It’s a big debate in town,” says Maria Crayne, a server at another local restaurant. “It’s like the Cubs vs. Cardinals.”
The sandwich’s popularity can be weighed not just in orders but in ingredients. On a typical day, D’Arcy’s Pint makes 90 to 100 gallons of cheese sauce, using about 240 pounds of block cheese and 750 pounds of french fries.
“We sell between 700 and 1,000 a day,” says D’Arcy’s owner Hallie Pierceall.
In the kitchen, two 10-gallon vats of the restaurant’s secret blend of white melting cheese and spices simmer continuously.
While hamburger is the classic choice, diners can order horseshoes topped with everything from ham and turkey to buffalo chicken and grilled vegetables. And for those who find two slices of Texas toast a bit daunting, there’s the half-size version: the “ponyshoe.”
“The biggest horseshoe day is Black Friday and the Saturday after Thanksgiving,” says Ms. Pierceall. “People are in town and tired of eating turkey, so they come in for the buffalo breaded chicken or their favorite horseshoe.”
Kendra Nordin Beato/The Christian Science Monitor
The horseshoe is widely believed to have been invented by Joe Schweska at Springfield’s Leland Hotel in 1928, says Ms. Bailey-Peetz. The original version was made with ham, with a curved shape that inspired the sandwich’s name, while the french fries represented the horseshoe’s nails.
Today, the horseshoe unofficially reigns as the state sandwich, to those who know it. But it turns out a politician from Chicago has an Italian beef with that. State Rep. Rick Ryan introduced a bill earlier this year to designate his favorite as the state sandwich. To keep a food fight from breaking out, the bill was recently amended to include the horseshoe as the “state’s official open-faced sandwich.”
“You can go anywhere and get an Italian beef,” says Ms. Bailey-Peetz. “Yes, it’s known for Chicago, but you can’t get a horseshoe anywhere else but here.”
Official recognition or not, the dish is so beloved that Springfield’s collegiate summer baseball team rebranded itself. The Springfield Sliders became the Lucky Horseshoes in 2022, swapping out their Abraham Lincoln logo for a horseshoe swinging a french fry bat, complete with a drip of melting cheese.
D’Arcy’s even sponsored a Lucky Horseshoes game this season, with Ms. Pierceall throwing out the opening pitch. When it comes to eating the local sandwich that she has served to tens of thousands of customers, Ms. Pierceall gets creative.
“I like to ‘garbage’ mine up,” she says. “I add fresh tomatoes, jalapenos, hot sauce, and top it with bacon bits. I can only eat them a couple of times a year.”
Everyone seems to have their own approach. For Brooklyn McCormick, who has waited tables at D’Arcy’s for eight years, that means a “deconstructed” horseshoe.
“I put everything on the side. The fries on the side, the sauce on the side. That way I can control the mess,” she says.
When Ms. Bailey-Peetz visits friends who have moved out of state, she packs quarts of D’Arcy’s cheese sauce in a cooler, shortening the miles to home.
“There is more to Illinois and Springfield than Abraham Lincoln,” she says. “The horseshoe is really our thing.”