Italian beef, Chicago dogs, and other foods from the Windy City have blown into Brooklyn. Bobbi’s Italian Beef, a new sandwich shop at 228 Smith Street, between Douglass and Butler streets, opened without much fanfare last weekend, but people walking down Cobble Hill’s main drag seemed to follow the smell of beef jus and end up at the counter. Most asked some version of the same question: “What should I get?”

“The name is Bobbi’s Italian Beef,” says owner Jason Lux, who’s from Champaign, Illinois. “If you don’t know what to order, I can’t help you.” Lux, a partner and former chef at Brooklyn Crab in Red Hook, started Bobbi’s as a stall attached to Fulton Landing Seafood Co. in Dekalb Market last fall. Let the record show: “We opened before The Bear,” he says, alluding to the hit Hulu television show about an Italian beef shop in Chicago that aired this summer.