PHILADELPHIA — It was not enough to have invented the Philly cheesesteak. Frankie Olivieri was sure of that, even if his father disagreed.
The sandwich that had tempted four presidents, Oprah Winfrey, Sylvester Stallone as Rocky Balboa, the pope’s valet — need he go on? — was, per one food influencer, “dying.” Other internet critics slammed his great-uncle’s creation as touristy, insisting diners could find tastier versions among the legion of copycats.
Frankie, 62, dismissed most of his competitors as “anyone with credit card debt and a Honda Civic,” but he could no longer ignore shifting appetites, especially his own. The third-generation restaurant owner, and possibly the last Olivieri in charge of Pat’s King of Steaks, felt responsible for protecting his family’s legacy. Which meant finally breaking free of their rigid expectations.
“My father,” Frankie explained, “was hell-bent on keeping it exactly the way it was.”
The way it was since 1956, at least, when Frank Sr. put his own twist on the Olivieri crown jewel: Kraft Cheez Whiz. Even basic additions that followed, such as mushrooms and sweet peppers, sprang from secret plots. No one had ever messed with the bread for what started 96 years ago as the “steak sandwich.”
How the cheesesteak was packaged and prepared had transcended mere tradition into what Frankie saw as his lineage’s identity. Like the Olivieri men before him, he had been bound to a menu item that filled him with pride yet blunted his ambitions. An attempt to untangle from the business in his youth failed. Filial duty yanked him right back to Passyunk Avenue, flipping Australian rib-eye alongside a patriarch who rested only on Sunday afternoons. They did things one way, his way, long after Frank Sr. had technically retired and his son inherited the flattop grill. Evolving would require a $6,000 self-help retreat and delivering his father’s eulogy.
So it was a big deal on the internet and the row-house-lined streets of South Philly when Frankie announced in February that it was time to make a change.
His website barely flicked at the inner turmoil: Pat’s King of Steaks breaks its own rules.
The rule breaks were so subtle, outsiders might miss the difference.
Frankie wouldn’t compromise the core recipe: choice of cheese, optional sautéed onions and sliced rib-eye. Never chopped. He had toyed with a vegan option, then concluded that a meatless sandwich was like “sex without the orgasm.”
The announcement-worthy idea came to him on a quiet afternoon as he prepared lunch in his home kitchen and considered the merits of mild toastiness.
“This is the ‘New School,’” Frankie said, lifting the altered cheesesteak.
He had spread Cheez Whiz onto a sesame-seeded roll (instead of a plain Italian one), and melted together the rib-eye and onions (rather than layering them). That was it.
“We will keep the two styles for a few more weeks!” his publicist posted on Instagram, but Frankie knew he intended to make the expanded selections permanent. One reason, he said, was customer requests. The other involved something that would never make it into a news release. He was cracking what he called a cycle of generational dysfunction.
“Not that I’m being spiteful,” he said.
Two months ago, he had recited his father’s eulogy by heart after typing a few lines in his iPhone’s Notes app: We honor those who have gone before us with tears and laughter, because while alive, that is what they have given us.
When did the tears begin? Probably with the early-1900s economic woes that drove his family from central Italy to this working-class block. They weren’t warmly welcomed. Toughness was a virtue for the immigrants. So was exuding pride, even behind a humble hotdog stand, which was how his great-uncle Pat got his start. One day in 1930, as the story goes, Uncle Pat grew tired of eating pork tubes and splurged for steak at the butcher. The rib-eye he tucked into a plain Italian roll caught the nose of a cabdriver, who urged him to sell those.
So Uncle Pat did for nine years, until an employee at his growing enterprise suggested adding provolone. Thus, the cheesesteak was born, and it was enough of a hit for the culinary inventor to start investing in real estate. He passed the restaurant to his brother Harry, who partnered with his son Frank Sr., who had wanted to be a lawyer before the obsession took over.
“My father held onto tradition so hard that his knuckles were completely white,” Frankie recalled.
He loved his father, and he feared his father. Maybe because as a kid, he rarely got to see his father. The most time they had spent together was at Pat’s King of Steaks, where Frank Sr. had internalized a belief that change was a betrayal and therefore had to be executed in secret. He hadn’t told Uncle Pat about his Cheez Whiz experiment until the rave reviews were undeniable. When Frankie and his mother began adding mushrooms and sweet peppers around 1980, they hid the vegetables from Frank Sr., who discovered the deception on an invoice. (The toppings, once proved successful, were allowed to proceed.)
Even after buying a nice boat (the Steakmaker), Frank Sr. stuck to personally sweeping the sidewalk around the service window. Renovating his heritage was a sore subject. He kept things as they were until he couldn’t. When a teenage Frankie stepped through the rotting floor one day, his father instructed him to tear down a neighborhood stop sign. They would cover the hole with the stolen octagon.
Frankie had planned to leave when he was 18. He had been accepted at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris and dreamed of opening his own thing, whatever that thing might be. He had gotten as far as finding an apartment on the bohemian Left Bank when he noticed that his father was short-staffed for the summer. He offered to help until September. The money was good. All these years later, he couldn’t regret sticking around — not after acquiring a Jersey Shore beach cottage, eight cars (for business and for pleasure), nine pinball machines and a boat of his own (Tide the Knot).
The issue that gnawed at him decades later was that staying felt like more of a hereditary imperative than an intentional decision.
What had Frankie actually chosen?
He had chosen today to meet with a 27-year-old food influencer wearing a Phillies-branded luchador mask.
“Love the pinball machines,” gushed the influencer, who goes by Djour Philly, stepping into Frankie’s office across the street from Pat’s King of Steaks.
Friends had been flitting in and out, so Frankie had arranged on his walnut desk a spread of sweet peppers, hot sauce and chunks of the “New School.” He motioned for his guest in the Mexican wrestling headgear to take a bite.
It was Djour Philly who declared in an Instagram video a couple weeks earlier that the Philly cheesesteak was dying. “It’s been perfected to death,” he had monologued to his 48,000 followers, lamenting that “even to the extent that Pat’s has changed up its formula, which is just bonkers to me.”
Frankie thanked him in the comments for the honest review. Then he added what he considered a polite response: Please let the World know that if it wasn’t for Pats Steaks since 1930 everybody else would be selling pretzels down at the Lincoln financial center or used cars or maybe just their souls for clicks …
“I’m glad we’re getting together,” Frankie said now. That was the self-help retreat talking.
Taking 100 percent ownership of the restaurant in 2021 hadn’t triggered the joy Frankie expected. His adult kids weren’t speaking to him after, in his view, siding with their mother following a bitter divorce. And he was recovering from heart surgery, too aware of his own mortality and the days slipping away.
His second wife, Nancy, nudged him to try a week-long program in California called the Hoffman Process, which claimed to help people dislodge traits they had adopted from their parents unconsciously “in order to win their love and attention.” Frankie wanted to rid himself of rigidness. “All toxicity from the past,” he said. The cheesesteak brought fortune to his family, but it also chipped away at their intimacy with long hours and kitchen-fostered machismo. The goal was to untangle who he was from what he had inherited through writing exercises, guided visualizations and a lot of talking. The takeaway was refreshing.
“Smoke ’em if you got ’em,” he told his friends. Don’t hold back. Frankie did love the business, after all, despite joking about selling it “only on days that end in Y.” Out of respect, he laid his father to rest before introducing a new kind of roll.
He had no succession plan, since his children remained estranged, though he hoped they knew the door was open. But the data showed his cheesesteaks were very much alive and selling daily by the thousands, no matter who was bashing them online.
“If you look at public opinion, that modern style,” Djour Philly said now in the office, reclining in one of Frankie’s leather chairs, “that’s all the top spots. That is what people say is the best.”
“Yeah,” Frankie replied neutrally.
The masked reviewer had already tried the “New School.”
“I liked it,” Djour Philly said, “how rounded and balanced it was.”
Tradition was winning bigger at the service window. Most customers were lining up for the classic recipe. That sentiment carried over to Instagram, where Pat’s King of Steaks had flash-polled its 92,000 followers, and 74 percent of respondents said they preferred the old-school variety.
It’s not that the bottom line had been suffering. Frankie had gotten requests for different buns, yes, but he also aimed to avoid stagnation, professionally and personally.
Heck, he would switch it up again by inviting Djour Philly to serve as the restaurant’s first guest chef. For one shift, at least.
“I’m thinking crispy kimchi,” Djour Philly said.
Frankie liked that idea. They put in on the calendar.
He was hungry for something else, though, when he headed back to the grill.
Frankie slathered a plain Italian roll with Cheez Whiz, just like his father liked to do. Then he layered on a few thin slices of rib-eye with a sprinkling of sautéed onions. No mushrooms, no sesame seeds. Just a splash of bell pepper juice, which had always been his thing.
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