Best Budget Bites: $9 Cheesy B From Band Box Diner

It’s one of the best breakfast sandwiches in town—maybe even the world?—but it’s also so much more.

11:26 AM CDT on July 18, 2024

Em Cassel

The cost of things these days? Far too expensive! Inflation, supply chain, giddy price gouging from proprietors large and small—the boring factors are too numerous to count. To protect our readers, Racket launched the Best Budget Bites series, where we’ll showcase a toothsome, wallet-friendly food item that’ll actually fill you up for less than $10. Have a nomination? Hit us up: tips@racketmn.com.

What: Cheesy B
Where: Band Box Diner, 729 S. 10th St., Minneapolis
Cost: $9
Availability: Wednesday-Sunday, 9 a.m.-3 p.m.

In a tucked-away street in Minneapolis’s Elliot Park neighborhood, $9 doesn’t just get you a breakfast sandwich—it’s enough to afford a time machine.

At the Band Box Diner, owner and chef Brad Ptacek reliably stands at attention behind the counter, spatula in hand. Neighbors run into neighbors and friends settle in across tables from each other, calling over the restaurant with insights about the weather (too rainy, this summer). Co-owner Heather Dalzen warmly and efficiently walks from table to table, refreshing stoneware mugs of coffee and scrawling down orders for breakfasts and burgers.

The Band Box is the oldest diner in Minneapolis, the first and last in a chain that once included 13 locations throughout the city (and one in Columbia Heights). Perhaps you can’t travel all the way back to 1939, when this location was built from prefab steel panels, but you can go at least as far as the mid-‘90s, when Ptacek took a place by the flat top that he’s occupied ever since.

Not much changes around here. The menu is a faithful list of short-order standards: omelets, burgers, pancakes, sandwiches. The coffee maker hums without rest. The black vinyl barstools stand at attention. The clientele would surely bristle if I got any more nostalgic about it than that.

OK, fine, so you want to know about the Cheesy B specifically? Here’s what you’re working with: cheese, egg, an English muffin. It’s a platonic ideal breakfast sandwich; the buttery muffin griddled to a marvelous crisp, the heap of American cheese—this really is a cheesy b—oozing onto the plate below. The egg, soft and fluffy, is folded into itself with the care and precision of an origami crane.

Yes, you could order Orin’s Sandwich, which comes with your meat of choice; for City Pages, Mecca Bos once called it “probably the best egg sandwich in the world.” And there’s Ze French Lil’ Buddy, which adds sausage and swaps the English muffin for French toast. But I’ve always returned to the simple, elegant Cheesy B, chuckling at the proclamation on the front of Band Box’s menus: “well prepared and smackin’ good.” I couldn’t have said it better myself. This is a sandwich greater than the sum of its parts.

Or maybe it’s the way the sun bounces off the bright-red countertops, or the sizzle of eggs hitting the griddle. Maybe it’s the fella at the counter who strikes up a conversation and says to you, as if he knows this specific visit is to research a write-up for your website, “Obviously you have good taste if you’re at the Band Box.”

For all that? Well, $9 is a small price to pay.