Philly Cheesesteak

The Cheesesteak, also known as the Philly Cheesesteak, is a sandwich which is served hot and is made from thinly sliced pieces of flat cut beef and is melted in cheese within a long hoagie roll. It became a popular regional fast food in Philadelphia and a popular food nationwide. There is a lot of debate about where the Philly Cheesesteak comes from, and essentially its history is based upon rumor and oral history. The stories are based on the fact that from the 1870s to the 1930s, Philadelphia’s immigrant population, specifically Italian immigrants, increased drastically due to political turmoil in Italy, which prompted many Italians to emigrate to the United States. In Philadelphia, where there was a large population of Italian immigrants, many of those immigrants were street vendors in order to make ends meet. Many of the vendors sold cheap sandwiches with inexpensive cuts of meat or even just meat drippings. The sandwiches were
In the 1930s, brothers Pat and Harry Olivieri had a food cart selling sandwiches on the corner of 9th street and Wharton Street. They sold primarily hot dogs and fish cakes. In 1933 it is beleives that Pat got bored of eating the limited items from his menu and asked Harry to go to a butcher and buy some meat that they could cook at their cart for lunch. Harry came back with a thinly-sliced ribeye and Pat cooked the meat with a few onions on the flattop, and they put it into a bun: this was the first version of the cheesesteak. As the story goes, a cabbie smelled the sandwich and requested to buy the sandwich. The cabbie then told the brothers that instead of hot dogs and fish cakes they should be selling the sandwiches. News of the brothers’ new sandwich spread quickly by word of mouth and by 1940, Pat and Harry Olivieri had enough money to buy a brick and mortar restaurant, Pat’s King of Steaks, on the same corner that they had their