By Iron Chef Leftovers
A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about cheese steaks in Seattle. Today, I began my quest to find out if there are any good ones with a trip to Calozzi’s in Pioneer Square (they don’t have a website, but here is the yelp page).
Calozzi’s is nothing to look at – it is a pretty big space filled with a bunch of tables and a small counter. I am fine with that. Eating a steak isn’t exactly fine dining and the two best in Philly don’t even have indoor seating, so the large indoor dining area is a plus.
The menu is pretty bare bones, about 5 or six different steaks and one or two other sandwiches and your sides are pretty much limited to fries and cheese fries, pretty standard for a Philly joint. I ordered a stake, wiz, without (that would be a cheese steak with cheese wiz without onions – the Philly equivalent of a cheese pizza), the cheese fries and a bottle of water. The total with tax was $15.
The Steak – I am not a big fan of chopped steak on my cheese steaks. I think they tend to be much greasier than sliced steak, but that is really just a matter of preference. The sandwich is large for $8 and could easily be split between 2 people, and are served in a paper wrapper, just as you would get in Philly. That, unfortunately, is the nicest thing I can say about the steak. The steak itself was nicely cooked, but really wasn’t seasoned well and actually tasted like it was cooked with green peppers. The wiz, while the right amount, was put on top of the steak and I ended up with more wiz on the paper than I did on my sandwich. This lead to a handful of bites that involved all 3 components of the sandwich while most of the bites were just soggy bread and mediocre meat. The roll was also not up to the task. Despite being no more than a minute from the grill to my table, the bread was already falling apart from the grease. Sadly, this is not the worst steak I have had in Seattle, but I probably wouldn’t order it again.
The Cheese Fries – A healthy portion of nicely cooked fries and cheese wiz served in a paper bag. They were tasty, although a bit salty, but were difficult to eat because the bad bag was essentially breaking down from the heat and the grease. I would however get these again.
If it was just about the food, I would give Calozzi’s 2 out of 5 Amaroso Rolls and I would say that Calozzi’s is probably fine if you are really jonesing for a cheese steak, but I wouldn’t make a special trip to go there. I, however, am grading it 1/2 out of 5 and will not be returning for a reason unrelated to the food. The reason – the bathroom in there was disgustingly dirty and the sink had been ripped from the wall and was not functioning. I seriously wonder if the bathroom had been cleaned recently anyway and it made me wonder about proper hand washing facilities in the restaurant for the staff. I understand that it is an old building, but I have been in portapotties at beer festivals that were cleaner and nicer at the end of the festival than the bathroom at Calozzi’s.
FlatbreadGarden 
The yelp reviews are overwhelmingly positive. But yikes! I guess they didn’t check out the bathroom condition.
This may fall into the category of everyone wanting “authentic philly”, so people eat it up regardless of what it is.
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I went with some friends on a similar quest. We went to Elo’s, down on Airport Way S. It’s the sort of place that begs to invoke the Bourdain Rule: You can’t make a living by poisoning your neighbors. It’s dingy, outside and in; it’s dark, depressingly so. It also has the hallmark of All Places Bad: a mixture of unrelated food genres…in this case it was Philly and Asian.
And it was the worst Philly cheesesteak sandwich I’ve ever had, possibly the worst sandwich of any kind (though the tomato, basil, and buffalo mozzarella on impossibly hard artisan bread I had in Point Reyes is up there, too, though that experience was tainted by the attack of norovirus; but let’s just not go there, shall we?)
SA
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I have eaten at my fair share of places that looked less than sanitary, but I do believe the Bourdain rule is correct – you can’t make a living by poisoning your neighbors. Paseo is a great example – the location in Fremont looked like the ceiling was going to cave in at one point, but the place makes killer food and always had a long line. They have to be doing something right. Calozzi’s wasn’t great, but it wasn’t terrible food wise, and I probably wouldn’t have completely written the place off if it wasn’t for the bathroom. If I had walked in there before getting my food, I probably would have walked out without eating. I wish I had a camera – I was really nice and left out some of the details on just how bad it really was.
One of the problems is that people are looking for “authentic” whatever (steaks, pizza, etc.) outside of the city that made them famous and end up being disappointed. I know I am not going to find a Pat’s steak in Seattle, but what I want is a good reproduction of what I might find there. If I want the authentic thing, I probably should just go to Philly.
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