a personBob Schutz

A Santa Maria market manager who, in the late 1950s, took a triangular piece of bottom sirloin that was going into the hamburger grinder, seasoned it and put it on a rotisserie. The cut he sold as tri-tip is now the whole town's dish.

The account comes from Larry Viegas, a butcher who worked with him at a Santa Maria Safeway: an excess of hamburger meat, a piece nobody wanted, salt, pepper and garlic salt, forty-five minutes to an hour on the spit. Other people claim the cut elsewhere — an Army butcher in southern California during the war, an Oakland butcher, a New York restaurateur — and the tri-tip record lays those out side by side.