Cheesesteak Crawl: Northeast Sandwich Company

There's a lot of meat on this sandwich and it's all good
Photo Credit: TH

A long time ago, okay, maybe like five or so years ago, Northeast Philadelphia had a tremendous little sandwich joint on Holme Circle called Blue Duck that served up amazing burgers, the signature being a pork roll burger, which wasn't a burger topped with pork roll, but one that had pork roll ground into it. In 2018, the whole operation went belly up when the original location and two satellite locations all went out of business due to the hubris of one of the partners. The other one, chef Kris Serviss, helped found a new joint in the Burlhome section called Northeast Sandwich Company. The place, nestled on a quiet corner in a mostly residential neighborhood, has carved out a reputation for putting excellence on a roll. Nashville hot chicken sandwiches, Italian roast pork, and pork belly-topped burgers are just a few of the items on the roster that I've had. Any Philly joint, however, has got to have a cheesesteak, right? NESCO has a few on the menu. Of course, I went with one.

The Place: Northeast Sandwich Company

Location: 1342 Bleigh Avenue, Philadelphia, PA (corner of Bleigh Avenue and Whitaker Avenue)

Website (Facebook)

The Cheesesteak Crawl, in case you forgot from the first entry, breaks down the iconic sandwich into its three elemental ingredients, meat, cheese, and bread, and also any extracurricular ingredients one might add. NESCO's burgers and roast pork sandwiches excelled among their peers. How would the cheesesteak fare?

Bread: In the battle between soft and firm, NESCO is firmly in the soft camp. Namely, they use what appears to be a roll either baked by Amoroso bakery or someone similar. Amoroso is a famous Philadelphia-area bakery specializing in sandwich rolls, long or kaiser. The long rolls are on the chewy side, but they are sturdy, making them ideal vessels for a cheesesteak if you prefer softer bread. Although I prefer a crustier loaf, the Amoroso-style roll is perfectly cromulent.

Meat: Firstly, the sandwich was PACKED with meat, which is a good thing. Oftentimes, when a sandwich is on a roll that appears less than a foot long, the tendency is to skimp on filling. The ability to close the rolls is overrated anyway, especially when the meat is this good. It's seasoned well to bring out the natural beefy flavor, and it's not stringy or gristly like some less sterling sandwich meats are. The steak definitely is the dominant ingredient on the sandwich. If you're going to bank on having a full sandwich, that meat better not be just a filler.

Cheese: The good news is that the standard on the steak, a homemade American cheese sauce, tastes phenomenal. American is my preferred cheesesteak (and burger) cheese because of how gooey and luxurious it is when it melts. Going the extra step and turning into a sauce is a brilliant idea in theory. However, that theory needs proper execution to tie the sandwich together, or, in layman's terms, you need to spread it evenly on the sandwich and use enough of it to put it on every bite in the sandwich. It's why I'm a wiz skeptic. It's too easy to glop and pool in parts of the sandwich, leaving other parts bare. Regular, solid-to-melt American cheese doesn't have that problem.

Extraneous Stuff: I'm of the school of thought on onions that either they need to be cooked slightly to translucence so that they retain crunch, or they have to be cooked down so far that the sugars are almost overdeveloped. Anywhere in between those points, and they probably are just adding moisture to the sandwich and that's it. Yet, the fact that few people get onions right rarely ever stops me from ordering them. What can I say, I fuckin' love onions. I have only gotten the bog standard issue cheesesteak from NESCO. However, they offer a breakfast pork roll cheesesteak that in addition to the king of processed pig contains scrambled eggs, and there's a chicken cheesesteak with General Tso sauce. Those options sound adventurous to say the least.

Overall Verdict: For as good as their other sandwiches are, I expected elite level cheesesteak performance from NESCO. The results have fallen just shy of the upper pantheons. In a city where everyone has a cheesesteak on the menu, occupying the A- or B-classes instead of S-class isn't a bad place to be. That being said, I would try the cheesesteak just for completism if I were you, but the other sandwiches are where it's at. Overall, Northeast Sandwich Company is an adventurous, whimsical, and most importantly, tasty gem in a less-traversed section of Philly that is worth going out of your way to visit, even if you don't get the cheesesteak.