Pat's King of Steaks

Where it sits. Pat's occupies the sharp triangular corner at 1237 East Passyunk Avenue, where 9th Street, Wharton Street and East Passyunk Avenue collide in South Philadelphia. There is no dining room. Orders are taken at a window on the point of the wedge, food comes out of a second window, and everyone eats standing at stainless-steel counters under an awning, in the open air, in whatever weather the city is providing. Directly across the intersection, no more than twenty metres away, Geno's Steaks occupies the opposite corner under an outline of orange and white neon bright enough to read by at two in the morning. The two of them together form the most photographed traffic island in Pennsylvania and mark the southern end of the 9th Street Italian Market.

The origin story. Pat Olivieri was running a hot dog stand at this corner in 1930 when, by the version his family has always told, he grilled thin-sliced beef with onions for his own lunch, a taxi driver asked for one, and the sandwich took over the business. Cheese came later — the usual account credits a manager named Joe Lorenza with adding provolone in the 1940s — and Cheez Whiz entered the repertoire after Kraft introduced it in 1952. The Olivieri family still runs the place. Geno's arrived in 1966, when Joey Vento opened directly opposite and set up a rivalry that has been good for both businesses ever since. Neither invented the cheesesteak in the form most people eat it, but this intersection is where the sandwich became an emblem.

On screen. Pat's appears in Rocky (1976), and the restaurant marked the spot where Sylvester Stallone stood with a plaque that is still on the wall. It is the same shooting week that produced the Steadicam run up 9th Street through the Italian Market a few blocks north, and the corner is a fixed stop on the Philadelphia visitor centre's Rocky bus tour. Since then the corner has served as visual shorthand for the city in a long run of productions and food television, but the 1976 appearance is the one that changed the queue. Note that later Philadelphia boxing films went elsewhere for their cheesesteaks — Creed (2015) shot its sandwich scene at Max's Steaks at Broad and Erie in North Philadelphia, a different neighbourhood and a different sandwich culture entirely.

How to order without holding up the line. The window has a grammar, and it is short. State the cheese first, then whether you want onions, then move. The three cheese options are Whiz, American and provolone; onions are "wit", no onions is "witout". So a cheesesteak with Cheez Whiz and onions is "whiz wit", which is the order most first-timers give and most regulars give too. Nothing else needs saying, drinks are bought at a separate window, and the counters are for eating rather than for lingering. The staff are brisk rather than rude, but the line behind you at 1am on a Saturday is long and it knows what it wants.

What the two sides actually taste like. The rivalry is real but the sandwiches are cousins. Pat's chops the beef finer on the flat-top and traditionally serves it on a slightly softer roll; Geno's slices its beef thicker and leaves it more distinct, on a firmer roll. Both use Amoroso-style Italian bread, both are enormous, both are better eaten within ninety seconds of collection. Doing one of each in a single sitting — the standard tourist manoeuvre — is a genuine test of appetite, and locals will tell you, correctly, that several less famous shops around South Philadelphia make a better sandwich. The point of this corner is not that it is the best; it is that it is where the argument started.

Getting there and timing. The Broad Street Line's Ellsworth-Federal station is about eight minutes on foot to the west, and the walk down 9th Street from the Italian Market takes ten minutes and passes most of what makes the neighbourhood worth seeing. Both shops trade twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and both are essentially cash-friendly operations built for speed. Weekday afternoons are calm; after a home game at the South Philadelphia sports complex, or after midnight at a weekend, the queue can run down the pavement and the corner becomes a kind of street theatre. There is no indoor seating anywhere, so a hard rain or a January wind genuinely changes the experience. East Passyunk Avenue, running southwest from the corner, offers the sit-down alternative when it does.