Call Vinnie's Italian Beef & Gyros a sandwich joint, if you must. Call Vinnie's agglomeration of steak, cheese, chiles and giardinera inside a bread roll soaked in jus an Italian beef sandwich. Just don't try to eat it as you would a sandwich.
If you do, Google Maps shows a dry cleaners about a mile away.
Vinnie's opened a couple of months ago on Ivanhoe Avenue in Lindenwood Park. (Roughly halfway between Pizza-a-Go-Go and Farmhaus, if you know the neighborhood.) It's a single room, with a covered patio. A roll of paper towels stands on each table.
It's that kind of joint.
The menu is split into two: the Italian Side and the Greek Side. The Italian beef sandwich ($6.50) is the signature dish of the former. It's messy, yes, but delicious. The thin-sliced beef is incredibly tender, and with the addition of that jus, deeply flavorful. The chiles and giardinera add a heat and a piquancy that complement, but don't overwhelm, the beef.
You can get a colossal version of the Italian beef sandwich for $8.25. I'm an eater by profession, though, and could barely finish the standard version.
From the Greek Side, I tried the gyro. This comes in both traditional ($7.50) and colossal ($8.50) sizes, though in this case the second isn't a supersized version of the first. Instead, it adds lettuce and crumbled feta cheese to the meat, onion, tomato and tzatziki sauce.
The gyro, too, is a fork-and-knife affair, especially if you spend the extra buck for the colossal. The strips of meat are very tender and nicely spiced, though with so much stuff atop them, you have to work to get a bit of beef in every bite.
A side of the fried potatoes ($2.25) is a must. These are fat chunks of potato, very crisp on the outside and cotton-tufted inside. Vinnie's tosses them with onions that, in my case, had been fried or grilled on the flattop until burnt. Remarkably, these still tasted good.
You can eat the potatoes with your hands, but a sluice of Sriracha (or, if you must, ketchup) really makes the dish.