Cheesesteak and Pizza Outing Cut in Half

Back in the spring of last year, I posted on what was then the hottest purveyor of cheesesteaks in the Philly region – Johnny’s Pizza of Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. The steak I had there was good enough for me to rank it in the upper half of my top twenty list. Yet in light of the countless raves I’ve read from people who rate Johnny’s cheesesteaks up there with the very best in the Philly region, I’ve had the nagging feeling that I should have ranked it even higher. 

Both their round and square pizzas are also frequently cited as being among the best. I took out a plain square pie during my first visit to Johnny’s and enjoyed it, but have been curious about their thinner crusted round pies ever since. 

My wife and I visited Johnny’s in Bryn Mawr earlier this year to try one of those round pies but were told upon entering that they couldn’t serve us without an advance order because of the large volume of business they do on Friday nights. 

After that experience, I put Johnny’s on the back burner for a while, but they moved up near the top of my places-to-visit list when I saw that they recently opened a second location in Wayne, Pennsylvania, and that the new spot appeared to have a much more pleasant atmosphere for those dining on site than the original in Bryn Mawr. We headed there last week to sample a round pie along with another cheesesteak for me. 

The Wayne location is new enough to not have their outside sign in place yet, but the inside looked great, especially the dining room.

To say I was excited about our meal would be an understatement.

So you can imagine how disappointed both of us were when we walked up to the ordering counter and were immediately informed that they were out of pizza. This was at  2:30 on a Sunday afternoon. It would be difficult to understand how that could happen at a pizzeria under normal circumstances. But the fact that the Eagles weren’t playing until the evening on that Sunday – and I’m sure they do a ton of takeout and delivery business during Eagles games – made it bewildering. I can only guess that they either made an error in planning for the day or received multiple large orders that they weren’t expecting. 

After discussing whether we should go elsewhere for a moment, we decided to stick with Johnny’s. I ordered a cheesesteak with Cooper Sharp cheese and fried onions, while my wife opted for a house salad and garlic knots. 

We moseyed back to their sparkling new dining room and had a fairly short wait for our food to come out. 

The garlic knots looked great, and my wife seemed pleased with both them and her salad.

As for the cheesesteak, the first thing one is likely to notice when getting a close-up look at a Johnny’s steak is the roll. It’s not your run-of-the-mill Italian sandwich roll. I’m not sure which bakery supplies them, but they are among the best in the region. It looks like the sort of crusty roll that wouldn’t need to be toasted – but they are, albeit just enough to add additional crunch to the outside. The inside was still soft.

I’ve written a number of times about my preference for untoasted rolls based on the belief that a good steak roll should have enough crustiness to stand on its own without help from an oven. In fact, I may have placed Johnny’s steak a couple places higher on my best-of list the first time around if not for that factor. However, more recently I’ve been to several places that lightly toast their rolls and have gradually been changing my philosophy on that. As long as it’s a very light toasting that doesn’t significantly alter the softness of the inside, I likely won’t penalize for that moving forward. 

There was a lot of meat and cheese on my steak. It may have been too much on a standard roll, but not on the extra wide rolls at Johnny’s. The coarsely chopped ribeye was ideally proportioned and beautifully seasoned. 

The cheese was also nicely judged and blended in with the meat on the first half of the sandwich that I ate. However, the other half had a bit too much Cooper Sharp and it wasn’t all blended in as well as I’d have liked. On the positive side, the onions were perfectly caramelized and added an extra layer to the steak’s overall flavor. 

If both halves were equally good, I’d almost certainly move Johnny’s up a bit in my cheesesteak rankings. As it stands, it will be a difficult decision when I next update the list. But it’s very unlikely to move any lower than its current position. 

I intend to return to one of Johnny’s locations for pizza in the not-too-distant future and will call in advance to make sure they haven’t run out of it. 

In the meantime, here is a photo of the square pie we sampled from them last year. 

It was very good as far as thick square pizzas go. But my preference is for thinner crust and I’m still eager to try one of their round pies. 

On another cheesesteak note, the people at Michelin put out a new list of recommended Philadelphia restaurants and included two steak shops. One is Angelo’s Pizzeria of South Philly, which is my top ranked cheesesteak. That makes perfect sense. However, their other recommendation is D’Alessandro’s of the city’s Roxborough section. That is befuddling given my reaction to the cheesesteak I had the last time I visited them.

I didn’t have much, if anything positive to say about that steak. The roll was sub-par, the meat was under-seasoned, there wasn’t enough cheese, and the onions weren’t mixed in with the meat. While it wasn’t the worst cheesesteak I’ve had since starting this blog, it was likely in the bottom ten percent. And I wasn’t going out on a limb with my negative review. D’Alessandro’s is routinely ripped as being past its prime and nowhere near as good as its vaunted reputation by the members of the Facebook cheesesteak group that I follow and contribute to.

That being the case, I headed back there this morning to see if there has been any improvement over what I experienced last time. My findings will be the subject of next week’s post.