Jim’s Steaks
400 South St., Center City, Philadelphia, 215-928-1911, www.jimsteaks.com

The grimier, the more uncomfortable the surroundings, the better the steaks, is the general unwritten rule of cheesesteakdom.

If so, Jim’s Steaks breaks it. Jim’s is clean, has seating, and even has some architectural style. No wonder the tourists go there in rolling rivers of Cheez Whiz. The other reason is Jim’s location on South Street, the Fisherman’s Wharf or Vegas Strip of Philly (that is, a place with pedestrian traffic at all hours of the day and night).

Guides on the tourist duck boats that cruise down South Street say Jim’s dates back to 1939—the liars. This Jim’s is actually a safer, mid-1970s spin-off of the original Jim’s on North Sixty-second Street, a place where out-of-towners now rightly fear to tread. Back in 1939, that part of West Philadelphia was a mixed neighborhood of Italians, Irish, and blacks with a Catholic school whose students would snack on the candy and soda Millie Pearlingi began selling from the front window of her row house to supplement the roofer income of her husband, Jim. Before long, Jim and Millie’s menu expanded to takeout lunch items, including steak sandwiches made with top and bottom round that became so popular that Jim was able to quit his roofing job and the family had to find some other place to live.

The spiffy black, white, and chrome art deco architecture of all four Jim’s Steaks restaurants is not original to the first Jim’s, as many people assume. Art deco had all but died out by the late 1930s and in any case was much too fancy and expensive for Depression-era blue-collar Philadelphia. Current Jim’s owner Bill Proetto ordered the chainwide redesign when he opened the South Street shop in the mid-1970s to give his cheesesteak patrons the same “zippy” feeling he gets from his personal deco collection, including fifty Louis Icarts and twenty Maxfield Parrishes. Many people associate the look with diners: Jim’s is just cleaner and nicer to its patrons than most diners (or cheesesteak places). During peak dining hours one employee does nothing but tidy up the tiny upstairs dining room. A sign up there thanks people for “not saving seats while others are waiting for their food.” (Compare that to the one at Pat’s banishing ordering miscreants to the back of the line.)

To get to the upstairs seating area, diners have to pass through a hallway containing boxes of Amoroso’s rolls, industrial-size Cheez Whiz cans, and a machine where an employee slices top round steak to paper-thinness. In other words, everything’s out in the open, including the lard and oil blend Jim’s uses in cooking the meat. “It gives a wonderful flavor. I’ll bet Le Bec-Fin uses it too,” says co-owner Abner Silver, referring to Philly’s most haute French restaurant.

The silver-haired Silver, a jazz buff, is responsible for the unusually large number of local and national jazz figures among the signed celebrity pictures that decorate the walls along with tributes to cheesesteak-eating champs. The current record—thirteen in fifty-seven minutes set in 2007 by a Royersford, Pennsylvania, IT manager—makes the hefty eleven-incher most people eat seem like a little snack.

To Get There: From I-76 E, take the South Street exit. Turn left at South Street and go about two miles. Jim’s is located at the intersection of Fourth and South, to the right. By public transportation, take any Regional Rail to the Market East Station; walk seven blocks east to Fourth Street and then seven blocks south on Fourth to South Street. By public transportation from Center City, take Bus 32 and get off at Lombard and South, or take Bus 33 to Market and Fourth and walk about three-quarters of a mile south down Fourth.

Other locations: 431 N. 62nd St., West Philadelphia, 215-747-6617 (original shop); 2311 Cottman Ave., Northeast Philadelphia, 215-333-5467; 469 Baltimore Pike, Springfield, 610-544-8400
Seating:At a counter downstairs and tables upstairs
Off-Street Parking: No
Alcohol: Yes, decent bottled beer selection
Hours: 10 a.m. to 1 or 2 a.m. Monday through Saturday, noon to 10 p.m. Sunday
Roll:11-inch Amoroso’s
Meat: Prime or choice U.S. steer top round, sliced in-house and chopped on the grill (Jim’s being the only representative of the chopped-style steak among the city’s highest-volume shops)
Onion: Chopped and precooked
Cheese: Whiz, provolone, or American
Grill Seasoning: Lard-containing Divo brand oil blend and a secret spice Abner Silver won’t reveal. (Could it be the same one used at his old Abner’s? See page 000.)
Celebrity Stories: Singer Lou Rawls showed up at South Street one evening and told staff that he had been “driving around for hours trying to find the place.” “Get to the back of the line,” ordered the unimpressed manager.
After downing a sandwich in the celebrity-photo-adorned upstairs dining room, a scruffy-looking man asked the meat cutter if the shop would like an autograph. “Who are you?” the cutter asked. Not being a folk music fan, the cutter didn’t recognize the name Dylan. “Have you ever been on [Johnny] Carson?” he asked. When Dylan said no, the cutter said he would take him up on his offer if he ever was.