After the museum we navigated over to Jim's Steaks (the Center City location) for my cheese-steak experience. The ended up not having the roasted pork on the menu and its not the kind of place where you ask a-lot of questions (late addition: I am an idiot who cant' read... the roast pork is at Tony Luke's). We waited in the line of about 50 people (we were there at 3 Pm hoping to miss the rush and apparently this was a light volume) for a couple of steaks and a hoagie. You order the steak before the hoagie but lets knock out the hoagie first.
It took forever to make. The guy moved like molasses and since the hoagie is like an afterthought at this place I think put their slowest guy on this station. The rolls they use are great, a little texture on the outside but then soft and fluffy inside perfect for soaking up juice. I think the meat was cappicola, prosciutto and some just boiled ham type thing (imagine Tina's horror). The hot/sweet peppers, salt/pepper, mayo, tomatoes etc. were all great and this would have been a great sandwich if it had not prevented me from eating my cheese-steak for 10 minutes.
For the steak portion you tell the man cooking the steak what you want (see previous post for the lingo), we went with 1 wiz and one provolone. The guy has an impressive volume of food on the griddle at all times and clearly is an experienced pro knocking out steaks at about 10 second intervals each one identically sized and with customized topping combos. You have to tip the man for the pleasure of watching him work. In the back you can see the other guys slicing the meat. There is a regular meat slicer but set to an impossibly thin setting and a kind of basket that catches the molecule-width steak and creates probably 2 lb stacks of meat in slightly offset piles so that Griddle man can scoop a known amount of steak onto the griddle when he needs to refill. Many cows meet their end at this place, I was awed. He keeps a pile of onions and peppers caramelizing right next to the steak and is like a Benihana chef with the metal spatula making a quick chop and scoop move to fill the steak. I could go on for hours about how much I loved standing at this counter watching an awesome thing being made awesomely.
As for the steak itsef this guy really says it all. The chopped texture IMO allows each bite of steak to be fully integrated with wiz and meat sauce. The bread texture is really perfect, holds the juices so that the last quarter of the sandwich kind of makes your head explode with happiness.
I plan to try some others next week when we get back toward Philly but this was pretty damn great and I'm officially putting it on the list of Places That Rock.
On the way back to the car we stopped into a little deli/bakery (Famous 4th), which was an accidental find and turned out to be great coffee (fresh ground) and amazing pastries. They are deservedly famous for the cookies and the rugelach (wow, there alot of ways to spell that I had no idea) was amazing.
After leaving to walk back to the car I noticed a weird guy in the second floor window across the street looking up and down the block with tiny binoculars. The camera was packed so I couldn't get a shot but it seems he is a fixture because on the google street view I'm pretty sure you can see him in the window. From that link go to full screen and look at the rounded corner window on the right. Anyway, he was a creepy dude.
That section of town was pretty funky and interesting, by funky I mean a million tatoo/piercing options and by interesting lots of great looking ethnic restaurants. Could be all tourist setup I guess but I would go back.
Next up is drive over to another foi's house for a home cooked Indian meal. I'm gonna need some time to put together all the notes on the Indian food we are eating, Tina has a notebook with recipes and notes but its in at least 3 languages and I'm not even so good with english.
Before the trip I got Tina a new phone as we are migrating over to AT&T. I wanted something PDA-ish but small for her but that had internal GPS for a backup to the general use of google maps on all our wanderings. The samsung blackjack ii has been a nice little phone. No complaints so far except that GPS kills the battery fairly quickly and couldn't get the satelites through the roof of the PT cruiser most times. Using it to get a fix on location though is great and the Locate Me feature in google maps that works off of cell towers is usually plenty when you are totally lost.
I mention this right now because any machine is only as good as the data we give it. To get to foi's house we pulled up directions 'from here' to 'contact address' and headed out. The problem was that she lives on Forrest drive as opposed to the Forest drive we had stored. The mailman can figure it out as she has gotten mail before but the little phone map sent us to a very nice house with a very nice family who were not at all Tina's and totally refused to make us any Indian dinner. A few miles away we got to the right spot and I at a silly amount of crazy hot food. We had to open all the windows during the cooking process because the kids were starting to choke/wheeze/cry that they couldn't breath for the chili fumes. Good times. After dinner we took the kid's to Friendly's for ice cream which seemed to be a corporate and ghetto mix of Tucson's Austin's. The place was filthy, the waitress sucked, the people at the table next to us were overfed/loud/NJ jackasses eating waffle fries and sundays at 11 PM on a Sat. night plannng their trip to the strip club. Oh and the ice cream wasn't great.
Saturday night and Sunday day was at another uncle's place. He has 2 girls and a boy who have all gotten married in the last year or so. They are all staying together while the 2 new husbands (from India) get all their work stuff setup. We did a short Valley Forge trip in the morning but the oppressive wet heat kept us from touring too far. The re-enacter guy who had all his kit laid out for like a demo was particularly unfriendly. E. Coast people are an odd lot.
From there we were meant to drive back to Newtown, PA for a night of staging before the NYC adventure but we got lost again when I couldn't get to the N. bound lane quick enough to make the PA turnpike and we got stuck in a morass of little country roads that were all under construction and not showing as such on our map. We cursed the phone but really not its fault. We also ran a turnpike payment stop when I got stuck in the Fast pass lane and some jackass tried to kill me when I went to merge to the cash lane. I assume I'll get a bill someday but whatever.
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