When You Hunger for Home Cookin’

When Thai and Cambodian food first showed up on the foodie radar, we could easily find the real thing in our restaurants. It’s actually been harder to get regional American food around here. Remember when beef stew mixed with oysters passed for gumbo?

So today, when everybody from Jack in the Box to the occasional falafel joint is claiming to make Philadelphia cheese steaks, real cheese steaks are still as rare in our time zone as Herr’s Potato Chips. You could wonder what all the shouting’s about.

But you could find out at the Philadelphia Connection, a Pasadena mini-mall spot with the antiseptic sheen of a soda fountain (somewhat undercut by the sports team banners and maps of Philadelphia and south Jersey on the walls). It claims its cheeses, cold cuts and buns are fresh from Philly daily, and it must be true. This place has made me a cheese steak sandwich believer.

It starts with a roll from the Amoroso bakery, as a sign splashed all over the front window boasts. Longer and less puffy than a hot dog bun, narrower and less chewy than a French roll, with a gratifying spongy texture and good fresh flavor, it would be great with anything on it.

The steak, cut almost carpaccio-thin before frying, will be chopped up for the sandwich unless you ask them to leave it in strips. Then comes the cheese--a white American cheese with a clean, buttery flavor--and some sweet, caramelized threads of browned onion. Throw on some pickled peppers (they keep a selection behind the counter), and you’ve got some eating there, pally.

Variations are available--with mushrooms, with a dab of pizza sauce, even one without cheese--but this is the sandwich that works for me. The chicken breast cheese steaks are comparatively bland, but such things are actually sold in Philadelphia, so I have to believe they’re authentic.

The Philadelphia Connection also makes cold sandwiches with these same buns, and a Quaker City friend described his Italian cold cut hoagie (ham, Virginia ham, Genoa salami, provolone) as tasting “as if it had been FedExed from Philly.” He singled out for praise the bun, the oil and vinegar dressing with oregano and the fact that the meat, cheese and even tomatoes had been sliced thin in the authentic manner. There are also ham-and-cheese, steak and three-cheese hoagies.

The only dessert would be a birch beer float or a pretty good thick shake made with (local) Fosselman’s ice cream. For real Philadelphia nostalgia, this place sells not only birch beer (like a light, reddish root beer) but a line of small cupcakes called TastyKakes and Goldenberg’s chocolate-covered peanut chews, with their molasses tang.

BE THERE

Philadelphia Connection, 633 S. Arroyo Parkway, Pasadena; (626) 304-9944. Open 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Monday-Saturday. No alcohol. Parking lot. Takeout. No credit cards. Lunch for two, food only, $15-$17. What to Order: cheese steak, Italian cold cut hoagie, birch beer.