‘Cheese Steaks’
Layovers are never fun. And I don’t mean the extended layovers that give you time to leave the airport to explore a city. I mean the layovers where you are just stuck in an airport waiting for a connecting flight. Yet, amidst that suck a lot of airports have begun to move away from only offering crappy fast food and overly expensive generic sports bar food. One of these places is Philly’s F Terminal, where a cheesesteak spot going by the name of Tony Luke’s can be found.
I’m not sure any first-time trip to Philly is worthwhile without a trip to Pat’s and Geno’s. Yes, I realize that they probably attract more tourists than locals, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are bad. Yes, I also realize that this wasn’t my first trip to Philly, but the only other time I set foot in the city was long before I became a meat blogger and I was snowed in the whole time anyway. So, yeah, I feel confident in saying it wasn’t worthwhile. I began my taste test with Geno’s for no other reason aside from that spot being where my taxi dropped me off.
EDIT: Stack’d II quickly became The Ave which quickly became the Tipsy Cow. Gone are the sandwiches, but you can read about the Tipsy Cow here.
While the list of great sequels is quite short, a few stand out. And joining the ranks of X-Men 2 and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: The Secret of the Ooze is Stack’d II (hopefully someday they’ll update their site to include this). As you may recall, I once paid a visit to Stack’d in Shadyside, a build-your-own burger concept that found success on sales of beer, keeping their burgers cheap and not by the quality of burgers being pumped out. In fact, this was so successful that they made a sequel that swapped burgers for cheesesteaks.
One day outside of my work, a new truck appeared. It was called Bera’s Custom Cheese Steaks and since the best cheese steak I’ve ever eaten came from a food truck, I thought Bera’s was definitely worth a try. They have a surprisingly robust menu for a cheese steak truck, ranging from Thai Chicken Steak to Stromboli Steak. But as good as some of these looked, I was thinking more about the “Custom” in their truck name.
In North Hollywood there is a little sandwich place with a ’50s theme called Philadelphia Sandwiches. I’m not sure how Elvis and cheese steaks are related (unless it’s a fluffernutter cheese steak), but somehow they have managed to coexist since the sandwich shop was started in the ’80s. Specializing in Philly Cheese Steaks, I figured the place at least deserved a shot at meaty glory.
Before spending a weekend of hiking in Joshua Tree National Park, we stopped at a little shop near the visitor center called the Park Rock Cafe. We didn’t need too much before a day filled with jerky and trail mix, but we at least wanted to get ourselves a square meal. There weren’t a lot of options, as you would expect. It was mostly sandwiches and all of them had some sort of vegetable plopped inside to ruin it. Despite this, I still chose their Philly Cheese Steak Sandwich, which came with onions and peppers. I ordered mine without those sandwich killers and then was given a choice between soup and salad. I made the obvious choice for soup, which was cracked lentils. I don’t really know how you go about cracking a lentil, but I do know that lentils are more of a legume than a vegetable, and legumes are just fine by me.
Where the mac and cheese balls from World Fare were my appetizer at the Silver Lake Jubilee, I still needed to find myself a main course. After a long stroll around the trucks, I found myself at a truck that I had never seen before, called Lee’s Philly. Lee’s Philly is born of the same vein as many of the Kogi-style food trucks. Their specialty is gogi beef, but while they have fused it with tacos and burritos, they have also created a Philly cheese steak out of the stuff. Wording on their truck claims that they have “LA’s Best Gogi,” but I took it upon myself to be the true judge of that.
As an attempt to mix up the sandwich scene from the usual Quizno’s and Subway, I took a ride out to Jersey Mike’s Subs in Hawthorne. The inside of the place was pretty similar to the typical sub place, so I was a little disappointed. I hoped that the sandwiches would at least be different. I had heard they had great Philly Cheese Steaks despite being from Jersey, so I was planning on getting one of those. It wasn’t easy, though, because they had some really good-looking sandwiches.
Stuck in the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport on a layover, I set out to find some good food to eat. This isn’t exactly an easy task, especially considering that I had a very limited amount of time to eat and had to resort to fast food. I found Charley’s Grilled Subs and decided to try it out. The had a grill where you could actually see what was being cooked, plus the prices weren’t out of control.
I quick glance at the menu revealed to me what I needed to eat, the Bacon 3 Cheese Steak, three of my favorite foods in one sandwich. They actually had a pretty efficient system set up, where the guy grilling asked you your order before you made it to the cashier, so it could be prepared ahead of time. I guess when you’re eating in an airport, you notice these things.