Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this storyYou’re reading the Food Scene newsletter, Helen Rosner’s guide to what, where, and how to eat. Sign up to receive it in your inbox.
The important thing to know about Danny & Coop’s, the new Philly-cheesesteak restaurant in the East Village co-owned by Bradley Cooper, of the piercing blue eyes and the considerable acting-directing chops, is this: the cheesesteak is good. It’s very good. It’s a hefty twelve-incher, the roll split lengthwise and filled with a glorious gloop of cheese (smooth and saucy Cooper Sharp, no relation to Bradley) and sliced rib-eye steak (tender, velvet-soft, paper-thin) run through with sweet ribbons of griddled onion. It’s the best cheesesteak I’ve had in New York, which isn’t saying much; it’s just as good as the best one I’ve had in Philadelphia, which is saying plenty.
Helen, Help Me!
E-mail your questions about dining, eating, and anything food-related, and Helen may respond in a future newsletter.
Cooper’s partner at Danny & Coop’s is the chef-cum-baker turned restaurateur Danny DiGiampietro, of Angelo’s Pizzeria, which makes the best cheesesteak I’ve had in Philadelphia. Opened in 2019, Angelo’s is a bold, baldly ambitious newcomer in a city that (like all cities) can at times be self-defeatingly in love with its own traditions. The restaurant serves terrific pizza and even better cheesesteaks that draw long lines running down the street or, some days, up the street the other way, just to keep life interesting. DiGiampietro’s focus on quality (“He just makes perfect food,” a fan once raved in the Philadelphia Inquirer) upended a cheesesteak field stultified by the sodium-laden clichés of “wit’ wiz” and gummy industrial steak. His high standards for the insides of the sandwich are a fair part of Angelo’s magic, but the real miracle is his bread: graceful torpedoes of flour and yeast and dough, the crust baked to a crisp, autumnal golden-brown and dusted with sesame seeds, the interior both soft and dense, sour and salty. Most bread used for cheesesteaks tastes like nothing; it serves as a container and a handhold. DiGiampietro’s bread tastes like bread, like sun on a wheat field, like the mysteries of fermentation, like salt and steam and the hot, mysterious darkness of the oven.
Paper-thin slices of rib-eye steak are blanketed in smooth and saucy Cooper Sharp cheese (no relation to Bradley).
Bradley Cooper, upon whom I, a sandwich obsessive, wish only blessings—may he receive every Oscar his heart has ever desired; I even forgive him for serving a runny egg yolk on a perforated plate in the movie “Burnt”—grew up just outside Philadelphia. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he seems to approach cheesesteaks with the same intensity that he brings to his directorial endeavors and his awards-season campaigns. Danny & Coop’s originated in 2023, as a pop-up food truck in New York, with Cooper manning the flattop. At the brick-and-mortar spot, as with the truck, much of the hype (and, I assume, much of the considerable line) was related to his celebrity. Especially in the restaurant’s early weeks, Cooper was regularly in the kitchen, working the grill with vigor, occasionally breaking to pose for selfies. He’s there less often now, but the wait’s grown no shorter—forty-five minutes on one of my visits, a little over an hour on another. Increasingly, the sandwich itself is the draw. Down to the tiniest sesame seed, it is almost identical to the one served at Angelo’s. There’s that heavenly bread—baked in-house, to DiGiampietro’s exacting specifications—stuffed with that creamy colloidal dispersion of meat and cheese; it’s even slightly under-seasoned, just as it is at Angelo’s, with a paleness of flavor that can result from too many rich ingredients in too great a quantity. But the lack of salt is easily remedied with the application of pickled peppers, your choice of hot or sweet. (I prefer hot, which are sharper and more vinegary.) The only real difference, between the one here and the one there, is that the onions at Danny & Coop’s are mixed in with the beef on the griddle, while in Philly they’re cooked and added separately.
The sandwich is a near-replica of the one served at Angelo’s Pizzeria, a popular Philadelphia restaurant run by Cooper’s partner, Danny DiGiampietro.
It’s actually pretty easy to hop down from New York to Philadelphia—it can take me longer to get from Park Slope to Greenpoint, depending on the emotional state of the subway—but the East Village is a simpler proposition. Still, for all the raptures this cheesesteak sent me into, I feel a strange unease about New York City being home to one of the finest examples of Philadelphia’s most iconic food. (This is the same disquietude I feel about the Chicago-style pizza at Emmett’s, which I prefer to most Chicago-style pizza in actual Chicago—the soft imperialism of New York City!) The sandwich may be the Angelo’s sandwich, but the experience isn’t the Angelo’s experience: the line is a very East Village line, gray-toned where South Philly is in warm browns and reds, litter-strewn, harder-edged. The narrow shop is bare bones, with a corrugated-metal ceiling, brick walls left mostly empty, and no seating. The interior is half taken up by the kitchen, plus an ordering counter and brief, shallow ledges for eating-in. There’s a bit of a provisional feeling to it all: the restaurant is a restaurant, but it’s also sort of still a pop-up, with all the scrappiness that entails. It’s open three days a week; friendly reminders of dates and times are issued via a Danny & Coop’s Instagram account, which doesn’t otherwise seem to be too meticulously maintained. The sandwich, I should have mentioned, is the only thing on the menu. It’s the only thing that gets lavished with attention. It’s the only thing that really matters. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
