Nine competitive eaters gathered at Game On! on Lansdowne Street across from Fenway Park on Saturday for a sandwich showdown two generations of North Shore locals have been arguing about in Facebook comments for years: whose three-way roast beef reigns supreme. The inaugural North Shore Beef's Three-Way Slider World Championship put a $3,500 prize and an unclaimed world record on the line at Game On!, and when the ten-minute clock ran out, Chicago's Pat Bertoletti stood alone at the top, having eaten 46 beef sliders.
The contest, reported by WBZ NewsRadio's Kyle Bray, marked the world's first Major League Eating-sanctioned roast beef slider competition of its kind at this scale. Runner-up Geoff Esper, an Oxford, Massachusetts native, finished with 43 sliders eaten, according to the same report. Rounding out the podium, London native Max Stanford took third place after eating 40.5 roast beef sliders in ten minutes, per EatFeats, which entered the contest ranked 8th in the world by Major League Eating.
A Sandwich Steeped in North Shore History
Each three-way slider packed thin-sliced roast beef, American cheese, mayonnaise, and James River Barbecue Sauce onto two slider buns, per the WBZ NewsRadio account. That exact sauce specification is no accident: food enthusiasts note that thicker commercial barbecue sauces fail to properly soak into thin-sliced roast beef the way runny James River sauce does, according to Paste Magazine.
The tradition traces back to 1951 on Revere Beach, when Kelly's Roast Beef founders first served thinly sliced leftover banquet roast beef on grilled rolls from a seaside hot dog stand, according to Kelly's Roast Beef. Kelly's Roast Beef, which Hoodline covered as it carved out new territory in Dedham, has long anchored the North Shore's roast beef culture. Andy Ferg, founder of North Shore Beefs, called the three-way slider the greatest sandwich in the entire world, per WBZ NewsRadio's report.
From Facebook Group to Fenway Spectacle
North Shore Beefs began as a private Facebook group and has since grown into a digital movement boasting more than 50,000 members, 40,000 Instagram followers, and a dedicated roast-beef mapping app, according to North Shore Beefs. The group was created to let fans review, score, and debate regional roast beef sandwiches across Massachusetts, the organization notes, and Saturday's contest at Game On! showed just how far that online debate has traveled. The venue itself sits on Lansdowne Street across from Fenway Park, on a strip long known as a hub for sports bars and nightlife around the ballpark.
Major League Eating officially sanctioned the contest, putting the $2,500 base prize purse alongside additional prize packages on the line for the nine competitors. It wasn't the first time the eating circuit's governing body had taken on roast beef sliders: MLE held a similar contest back in November 2009 in Frederick, Maryland, where competitor Bob “Humble Bob” Shoudt won a $2,500 purse at a Roy Rogers restaurant. That earlier event served as MLE's first sanctioned roast beef slider contest, predating Saturday's Fenway spectacle by roughly a decade and a half.
Elite Talent and a Hometown Underdog
Bertoletti didn't arrive at Fenway as an unknown quantity. He is the 2024 Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest men's champion, having set a personal best that year by devouring 58 hot dogs and buns in ten minutes to claim the Mustard Belt in Coney Island, according to Sports Illustrated. He entered Saturday's contest ranked second in Major League Eating's Top 50 world rankings, which the organization updated on Friday for the first time in more than eight months, placing Joey Chestnut at No. 1 and Bertoletti at No. 2 just before the Fenway event, per EatFeats.
Esper brought his own credentials to the Fenway stage. The Oxford native had previously placed second to Bertoletti at the 2024 Nathan's contest, eating 53 hot dogs that year, according to Sports Illustrated. He maintains his top-three world ranking, per the same Sports Illustrated report.
Belmont native Crazy Legs Conti also competed for the grand prize, entering the contest as the world's 30th-ranked eater. Ahead of the ten-minute clock, Conti said he planned to take three bites and wash them down, according to WBZ NewsRadio's account of the event. It wasn't enough to catch the leaders, but for a hometown eater squaring off against a two-time Nathan's podium finisher and a top-ranked global talent, just sharing the stage at Game On! carried its own local bragging rights.
In the end, Bertoletti earned a trophy and the $3,500 cash prize for his 46-slider performance, closing out an afternoon that turned a hyper-regional New England sandwich obsession into a nationally sanctioned competitive-eating spectacle. The unclaimed world record that organizers had put on the line was another part of the event's stakes.
