Arguing over the anatomy of a proper cheesesteak is almost as old as the cheesesteak: finely chopped meat or thick slabs, American or whiz or provolone, the best width of an onion, the ratio of cheese to meat, soft or hard bread, seeds or no seeds.
But ever since a little pizzeria called Angelo’s moved across the Delaware to Philadelphia’s Italian Market to serve steaks with tangy Cooper Sharp American cheese on house-baked bread, the cheesesteak hasn’t been quite the same.
Lately, a lot of the most acclaimed new steaks aren’t in Philadelphia at all..
A new school of cheesesteak shops, inspired by Angelo’s and an army of cheesesteak hounds on social media, has sprung up over the past four years from Delaware to the edge of Princeton, New Jersey — threatening to unseat old favorites like Dalessandro’s and Jim’s in the pantheon.
More:Are the best new cheesesteaks being born outside Philadelphia? The new ribeye arms race.
A new consensus has emerged: Hard, seeded roll. Voluminous steak, probably ribeye, in amounts that seemed previously inconceivable except as a gimmick. Enough Cooper Sharp to make each sandwich cheesier than an ‘80s movie. A renewed attention to bread with character, and quality of meat. And, of course, a commensurately higher price tag, sometimes $15 or $17 for a steak.
Reader, it’s delicious.
After trying dozens of steaks lauded as the best, here’s our favorite 10 among the new crop of cheesesteaks within an hour’s drive of South Philly.
Angelo’s Pizzeria
736 S. 9th St., Philadelphia, 215-922-0000, angelospizzeriasouthphiladelphia.com. Closed Monday-Tuesday. Cash only. Call ahead!
Angelo’s is the ur-daddy and prime inspiration for the new cheesesteak, a Jersey-born pizzeria from South Philly native Danny DiGiampietro that has managed to change the whole conversation around cheesesteaks since moving to Philly’s Italian Market in 2019.
The anatomy is simple: An impossibly crusty, fresh-baked and long-proofed house roll that makes bread the main character, imbuing each bite with nutty crispness and chew. A tangy, aged-cheddar American cheese called Cooper Sharp that DiGiampietro has loved since childhood — a Pennsylvania-born cheese rarely seen on cheesesteaks until recently. And 10 ounces of premium ribeye, ladled into a roll whose center has been scooped out so bread and meat reach maximum harmony.
And, of course, a special ingredient that’s not on the menu: a little bit of grease.
“I’m a big believer in grease on the cheesesteak, man. … Not too much, my cardiologist freaks out at me. But enough so you get the taste,” he said. “These places that put water on the grill? Naw, man.”
The result? A heavenly balance of bread with grainy character that fills the mouth. Meaty ribeye. Cheesy tang mixed with meat juice into a sort of fatty, funky symphony.
Maybe your cardiologist will freak out. But so will you.
And so has the whole city: Call ahead with your order, or you’ll end up waiting a half-hour on the sidewalk with a mixed crowd of locals and tourists. Bring cash.
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Brynn Bradley
839 N. Broad St., Woodbury, New Jersey, 856-845-9758, brynnbradley.com. Closed Monday-Tuesday.
Opened in late 2020 by chef Matthew Hartnett, Brynn Bradley’s cheesesteaks are like a checklist of everything that is loved by the new generation of cheesesteak fan: Seeded Liscio’s roll delivered fresh daily. Sixteen ounces of fresh ribeye shaved in-house and chopped to medium medallions. Generous Cooper Sharp cheese, well-distributed into the meat until it’s almost but not quite invisible. Onions tight-chopped and well distributed within the roll.
The whole concoction is juicy enough it seeps into the roll, but the roll is equal to the challenge. The Brynn Bradley cheesesteak is admirable in both heft and harmony, a dancing bear of a sandwich. It’s the picture they’d put in the textbook when you asked what a cheesesteak looks like in 2023.
Show up for lunch and expect to see every guy in an orange construction vest working within a radius of miles, or maybe even some homesick military guys who drove down all the way from Virginia. Most will order the same thing you do.
Cafe Carmela
2859 Holme Ave., Philadelphia, 215-821-2584, 2975 Philmont Ave., Huntingdon Valley,215-821-2584,cafecarmelaphilly.com. Closed Monday.
When Joseph and Anna Marie Maglio opened Cafe Carmela in deep Northeast Philly in 2020, they never intended to serve cheesesteaks.
But then, you know: the pandemic intervened.
Looking for a good takeout item, they modeled their cheesesteak after South Philly favorites both new and old — Angelo’s, and John’s Roast Pork. In particular, Anna Marie loved Angelo’s use of the same the Cooper Sharp cheese her own grandmother had long used on homemade steaks.
But the steak at Carmela is bigger in most ways. Twelve ounces of ribeye. Lots of seasoning. Lots and lots of Cooper Sharp or sharp provolone. Onions well-blended. A seeded roll from Carangi bakery, just like at John’s, turned out to be the roll that held up best to the magmal flow of meat and cheese.
The cheesesteaks at Carmela now not only rival their pizza in popularity, they rival the best cheesesteaks in Philly and beyond — leading the Maglios to open a second shop in Montgomery County’s Huntingdon Valley this month.
Curly’s Comfort Foods
1140 Bristol Oxford Valley Road, Levittown, Pennsylvania, 267-639-0787,curlyscreations.com. Closed Monday,
Michael Sarian, a bald-pated “Curly” in a long line of bald-pated Curlys, first put his 1-pound cheesesteak on the menu as a joke. The long-time comfort-food cook had gotten access to a supply of premium ribeye, and figured what the heck?
“It was a gimmick,” he said. “But people liked them.”
During peak pandemic, May 2020, he was handing out cheesesteaks for free to workers at local businesses in need. And then the steaks caught on, especially on social media with a newly formed Cheesesteak Gurus Facebook page that’s now swollen to more than 80,000 members.
But it wasn’t just hype. It was also technique. Sarian layers meat, then cheese, then more meat, then more cheese, to distribute Cooper Sharp evenly and create a lovely substance that is neither meat nor cheese but gloriously both. His Aversa rolls are a special order that get extra time in the oven: sturdier, crisper, with more chew and an interesting sourdough twang.
And if you feel like a pound of meat is too much? Sarian added a “small.” It’s still 12 ounces.
Corson’s Steaks
14 Tanner St., Haddonfield, New Jersey, 856-354-0006, facebook.com/corsonssteaks. Open Friday-Sunday.
Corson’s is among the newest entrants in the cheesesteak sweepstakes, opening only last November. But veteran chef Mark Rooks quickly evolved his friendly shop into a heavy-hitter in Haddonfield’s self-consciously quaint downtown. Corson’s has one of the most distinctive new-school steaks on this list.
The meat is somewhere between sliced and a large chop, with strata of tender meat and cheese seasoned just enough to bring out the flavor, wet enough with meat juice to feel gravied, topped with massive and sweetly caramelized slices of onion.
The sandwich is almost French in its richness, a bit like the beef bourguignon of cheesesteaks, all filed into a seeded Liscio’s roll that strains to carry it. If you’d like Cooper Sharp, ask for it off-menu. It’s there.
But come hungry, or come with a friend. Lord, the Corson’s cheesesteak is large. Too large for the sane. Too large for the single. Large.
Joseph’s Pizza Parlor
7947 Oxford Ave., Philadelphia, 215-722-7000, josephspizzaparlor.com. Open daily.
Joseph’s is a funny entrant on this list — as much a reaction against current cheesesteak trends as a successor to them. .
Co-owner Matthew Yeck, who years ago helped invent a Fieri-approved Cooper Sharp kielbasa cheesesteak at Port Richmond’s Gaul and Co., eschews Cooper on a basic cheesesteak. He’s also decided against ribeye.
Cooper’s is too much muchness, he says. Ribeye is a flavorful cut, but prone to gristle.
And so after taking over classic Northeast Philly steak and pizza joint Joseph’s with partners Joseph Forkin and Jimmy Lyons, they decided to make a knuckle sandwich.
Specifically, they buy the only prime-grade beef knuckle Yeck’s ever seen, from a butcher shop in South Philly. And they cut out the funny parts using high-tech tools at a plant in Delaware, to get fine-marbled knuckle slabs.
Joseph’s chop the meat with American cheese that’s not Cooper, onto a special “clean” Liscio’s roll with no additives or preservatives. The result is not as outrageously rich or nuttily distinctive as many of the viral cheesesteaks on this list.
But it’s a knuckler right across the middle of the plate. It is a cheesesteak somehow both traditional and as nontraditional as it gets: an anti-modern modern cheesesteak.
Lillo’s Tomato Pies
2503 Marne Hwy, Hainesport, New Jersey, 609-491-7751, facebook.com/LillosTomatoPies. Closed Sunday-Monday.
Open since 2021 on a desolate stretch of Hainesport, Lillo’s is the cheesesteak’s version of a sleeper hit. The bustling family pizza shop is home to not just an excellent Trenton pie, but also what some in Jersey have anointed as the best cheesesteaks in the known universe.
The first bite will pretty much knock you out of your chair, and maybe change your dating life. The key ingredient, the one that makes people wild, is garlic aioli. The sandwich near-steams with it. Essentially, Lillo’s had the crazy idea to load a thick Cooper Sharp cheesesteak onto garlic bread.
The result is intensity and richness. For some, it’s the apocalypse, the end of what they can allow on cheesesteaks. For others, it’s the rapture.
I felt both ways, many ways at once: Is it too much, this garlic spread? On this sandwich that also features cheese and ribeye and onion and seeded Liscio’s roll?
That first bite will have you writing your mother about true love. By the end, you will need to decide: Do I now also have to talk to a priest?
Mama’s Meatballs and Pizzeria
2673 Haddonfield Road, Pennsauken Township, New Jersey, 856-488-5253,mamasmeatballs.com. Closed Monday,
The son of Sicilian immigrants, Joe Argento grew up amid baking his whole life, at pizzerias run by his family.
And so when he and wife Katherine took over 7-year-old Pennsauken business Mama’s Meatballs in 2020, he knew he would devote himself to making the perfect pizza dough and to baking the perfect Italian roll for the restaurant’s namesake meatballs.
But then a customer told him, hey: If you make a cheesesteak, people will come in for those more often than they do for meatballs. That was that.
Argento concocted a delicious and distinctive fresh-baked roll: thick-crusted, with doppio flour brought in from Italy, seeded like a field in spring. And in a story familiar to other restaurants on this list, that ribeye cheesesteak has taken over about a third of his business, same as his pizza.
It’s terrific, this bread. If they sold it only with butter and jam, I’d still come.
Now, the shop will be expanding into the space next door, offering dining room tables but especially a whole new room devoted just to proofing and mixing dough.
As for the decision to sell Cooper Sharp on those steaks? Fourteen ounces of medium-chop ribeye? It’s just the new phenomenon that everyone’s asking for these days, he said. Left to his own devices, Argento himself would make a slab steak, with plain Clearfield American.
But when the world comes knocking, he answers.
“A few years ago,” said the Pennsylvania native, “I didn’t even know what Cooper Sharp was.”
Meatheadz Cheesesteaks
2495 Brunswick Pike #39, Lawrence Township, New Jersey, 609-583-4292,meatheadzcheesesteaks.com.
Meatheadz is a bit farther north than you’d expect for a top-tier cheesesteak spot. Between Trenton and Princeton, it’s a little outside the normal delivery radius for Philly bakeries.
But by a fluke, Meatheadz also happens to be down the street from the the guy who delivers seeded bakery rolls for legendary bakery Sarcone’s. And so Joseph Weintraub, who owns the shop with his brother and dad, scored a coup. He’s pretty sure he’s the only spot in Jersey with Sarcone’s legendarily character-packed rolls.
As with Angelo’s, a shop the Weintraubs admire, the key is delivering a meaty wallop. The combination of 14 ounces of fresh ribeye and Cooper Sharp sauce makes their steak among the juiciest of all the new cheesesteaks. It threatens to overwhelm even a famously hearty Sarcone’s roll.
“That juice? That is juice from the meat. That’s the good stuff,” he said.
Each sandwich is cooked only to order, says Weintraub. And they don’t annihilate the meat on the grill.
The Meatheadz steak is a meaty, cheesy mess of a thing. It is wet as an otter’s pocket, frankly a ridiculous thing — and I’ll drive nearly an hour to eat it with anyone who asks.
Ochinili’s Steaks
428 E. Main St, Middletown, Delaware, 302-696-2028, facebook.com/Ochinilis. Closed Monday.
Our favorite new-school Delaware entrant is the product of homesickness.
Philly native Sie Saunders ate at near every cheesesteak spot in Northern Delaware, but none had the exact flavor in his head: Cooper Sharp, generous meat, seeded rolls full of character. The steaks he and wife Laurel found on trips to Angelo’s in Philadelphia. (Although heads-up for old heads in Delaware: Classic shop Ioannoni’s in New Castle newly offers seeded rolls and Cooper Sharp, on request.)
So, the couple figured they’d become the change they wanted to see in the world. Burned out working long hours as a nurse during the pandemic, Laurel quit her job and made their shared love of cheesesteaks into a career. They opened in December, naming the shop after a nickname for their son.
Order basic, and Ochinili’s offers an admirable new-school steak with seeded Liscio’s, ribeye and Cooper Sharp. But the gamechanger here is the variations, in particular a “West Philly” steak that subs out basic fried onions for crispy onion straws the restaurant makes in-house each morning.
Meanwhile the Liberty Bell Patel, named for (and spiced by) a family friend, incorporates earthy Indian spice, green chilies and a garlic ginger sauce. The North and West Philly specialties of salmon cheesesteaks, fish hoagies and cheesesteak egg rolls likewise make appearances on the menu.
More:In North Philly and beyond, salmon is the new cheesesteak. But don’t tell South Philly
On a recent visit just an hour before closing, the mini-mall steak shop looked like a voting precinct on Election Day — filled with customers of every age, and every walk of life.
Matthew Korfhage is a Philadelphia-based writer for USA TODAY Network. Email him at mkorfhage@gannett.com or follow him on Twitter @matthewkorfhage.
