Maybe you’ve been to Philadelphia. Maybe you think you know cheesesteaks. But if your idea of them has anything at all to do with Cheese Whiz, Philadelphia native Heather Rau would like a word.
She learned about them at Chink’s Steaks, the legendary steak shop in her family’s neighborhood in Northeast Philadelphia.
“When someone would come in and ask Chink for Cheese Whiz, he wouldn’t even look at them,” says Rau. She knew Samuel Sherman, who went by “Chink,” from the time she could chew solid food, and she started working in his shop when she was 14. “He would just shake his head and point to the right, and he’d tell them to go to South Philly. Why are you going to mess up perfect ribeye by putting Cheese Whiz on it?”
Chink’s was one of the first steak shops in Philadelphia when it opened in 1949. By the time Rau worked there in the ’80s, people were coming from all over. “Chink is an icon in Philadelphia,” she says. Rau worked as a waitress and cleaned. But she saw everything: the bread delivered fresh every morning on the front step, and the steak, cheese, and onions, always sliced the day they were grilled and served.
Rau took some Chink’s cheesesteaks with her when she worked for a while at a golf course in Palmer, Alaska, in the early 2000s and shared them with her co-workers. “They were like, ‘Can you make this?’” That planted the seed.
And a decade into her career as a special education and autism teacher for Monongalia County Schools, that seed took root. “I started making them for my friends in Morgantown, and they were like, ‘You know, you might want to try to sell this,’” she says.
She liked the idea. But she wasn’t going to grill just any steak and onions and put it with some random cheese on whatever roll she could get at the grocery store. For Rau, Chink’s steaks had a balanced sensory perfection to them. “When you walked up the street, half a block away, you smelled Chink’s,” she says, her voice getting a little dreamy. When you finally got your sandwich and brought it up to your mouth, she says, the aroma was irresistible. You’d bite into a satisfyingly crunchy crust. And then all of it, the bread, the ribeye, the white American cheese, the veggie, would melt together in your mouth. “The melting in your mouth—that would be the romance of it. And the aroma.”
Ribeye steak is a must, Rau says, and she can get good ribeye here. Onions are pretty universal. Unlike Chink, she adds green peppers, and for cheese she’s happy with Land O Lakes white American cheese.
“The hardest part is the bread.” It has to be crusty on the outside, doughy on the inside. She took samples to two pepperoni roll bakers in Fairmont, but their attempts were doughy—great for pepperoni rolls, not so good for a cheesesteak. “You can’t have it too thick—it all has to meld together evenly.” In the end, she struck up a relationship with a baker at Sam’s Club, who modifies her usual method for Rau. “She’ll let it rise a little longer and bake a little longer, so it gets crusty,” Rau says. “When you slice into that and you put ribeye on it with white American cheese—that’s a Philly cheesesteak.”
Rau started grilling at events as Heather’s Original Philly Cheesesteaks in 2016. Now retired from the school system, she does occasional pre-scheduled pop-ups of 30 or 40 cheesesteaks, selling the sandwiches by reservation ahead of time online. If you catch her announcement on Facebook, you can be one of the lucky ones to get a cheesesteak almost from the grill of Chink himself.
And if you have a pretty good idea that your neighborhood or workplace will buy 30, Rau will consider coming to you—just message her on Facebook.
“Chink’s was such a big part of me growing up where I lived, and when I worked there, it taught me incredible work ethic,” Rau says. “That time frame in my life really means a lot to me, so I care about the cheesesteak. My mission is to bring a little taste of Philly to the hills of West Virginia.”
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