Are the best new cheesesteaks being born outside Philadelphia? The new ribeye arms race.

The cheesesteak has evolved.

If you didn’t notice, it’s OK. It’s all been pretty sudden.

But in parts of the region rarely visited by travel shows — the mini-malled main arteries of Northeast Philly and Bucks County, the calicoed townships of South Jersey and northern Delaware — Philadelphia’s most famous food has swollen to an unholy, almost unmanageable and, frankly, delicious form.

Bigger. Meatier. Seedier. Fresher. And especially, Cooper Sharpier.

In the process, the tired old cheesesteak has seen a level of excitement and meticulous attention it hasn’t gotten in years or maybe even decades.

Consider it a ribeye arms race or the cheesesteak’s hazy-IPA moment, spurred on by a social media-fueled armada of 80,000 cheesesteak fanatics and the love of a little Jersey-born shop called Angelo’s.

In a former Checkers drive-thru in the Philly suburb of Levittown, a shop called Curly’s takes so many requests each weekend for its 1-pound steaks — heavy-laden with fresh ribeye on a seeded Aversa roll that betrays a light sourdough tang — that it has to limit the number of orders in each 15-minute block.

Cafe Carmela in far Northeast Philly figured they’d add cheesesteaks to their pizzeria as a takeout option when they opened in a pandemic. Now, they’re mobbed with as many as 600 orders a day for hard-baked Carangi rolls brimming with Cooper Sharp cheese and fresh-chopped ribeye that flows like magma but tastes like co-owner Anna Marie Maglio’s childhood.

More: The cheesesteak has changed. Here are 10 of the best new steaks, from Philly to Jersey and Delaware

Ochinili’s Steaks in Middletown, Delaware, keeps a waiting room busier than a barbershop’s for chopped and cheesy steaks loaded with crisp shoestring onion made from scratch each morning. And in Pennsauken, New Jersey, Mama’s Meatballs and Pizzeria now devotes half its business to cheesesteaks served on house-baked bread whose exterior is so crisp it might as well be a pretzel.

“It’s like a light just switched on,” said Mike Fanelli, a cheesesteak hound who has been tracking this phenomenon on a TikTok called The Godfather of Meat, where nearly 300,000 followers tune in for detailed reviews of each sandwich’s unique harmony of meat, cheese, onion and bread.

A few years back, the classic soft cheesesteak roll staged a Jimmy Hoffa-caliber disappearing act, giving way to the hard, seeded rolls that have become the new gold standard at the region’s old family bakeries from Sarcone’s to Liscio’s to Carangi.

Cooper Sharp cheese — a tangy aged-cheddar American invented in the region but now made mostly in Wisconsin — was until recently a cult item rarely seen on a steak. Now if you don’t have it, customers will keep bothering you until you talk to your wholesaler.

Newer shops began to advertise not just the cut of meat they use (usually ribeye) but sometimes where and how they sourced it. And hoo boy, they started using a lot more of it: Instagram-ready cheesesteaks now swell and sweat with as much as a pound of medium-chop meat, slathered thickly with glistening cheese.

Heck, even the new Uncle Charlie’s steak, made by food megalith Aramark at the Phillies stadium, now looks a lot like this: Seeded Liscio’s bread. Cooper Sharp. Much ribeye.

More: We tried the new food at the Phillies ballpark, including a Charlie Manuel cheesesteak

When you ask cheesesteak cooks what’s happening, they tend to say one of two words.

Gurus, they say.

And, of course, Angelo’s.

How a onetime South Jersey baker changed the cheesesteak in Philadelphia

In one telling, the modern cheesesteak was born 20 years ago at the Cowtown flea market near the border of Jersey and Delaware.

That’s where a future baker named Danny DiGiampietro started selling cheesesteaks the way he always liked them at home. Specifically, he loaded them up with a Pennsylvania-born cheese called Cooper Sharp, which had all the blessed silkiness of classic American but also the twang of aged cheddar.

South Philly, perhaps the only place on Earth where a Chinese-owned mini-mart might be expected to sell its own aged provolone, loves cheese with funk and twang — and South Philly was where DiGiampietro was raised.

“I always loved Cooper Sharp. I just loved it,” DiGiampietro says, now. “So I did it (at Cowtown), but we didn't advertise it as Cooper Sharp. It was just ‘American cheese.’”

Two careers, 12 years and a failed bakery later, DiGiampiatro opened a pizzeria called Angelo’s in Haddonfield, New Jersey, with a mission to finally turn his love of bread-baking into a viable business.

“The only way I knew how to make money baking bread is to stuff a bunch of meat in it and sell a sandwich,” he said. “But for me, it’s always been about the bread.”

In Jersey, he became known for long-proofed pizzas lauded among the best in the state. But from the start in 2013, he already had the formula that eventually turned Angelo’s into a cheesesteak juggernaut. Ten ounces of ribeye steak, generous Cooper Sharp, and a long-proofed seeded roll with more crust and character than a Steve Buscemi cameo.

The default cheese on cheesesteaks has changed many times over the years. The sandwich's inventor, Pat Olivieri, originally didn't even use the stuff. And cheese's early decades were a bit of a free-for all at shops all over the city — provolone, American, even outliers like mozzarella and Swiss — while the famous cheese whiz was a somewhat late introduction.

Cooper Sharp pretty much wasn't anywhere, until it was everywhere.

By the time DiGiampietro moved his acclaimed pizzeria to Philadelphia’s Italian Market in 2019, his baking skills had turned Angelo's into an unstoppable force for both pizza and sandwiches — with constant lines on the sidewalk, and video love letters from both Barstool Sports' Dave Portnoy and Action Bronson's unprintably titled Vice Media TV show.

The cheesesteaks became as famous as the pizza. And Angelo's became an inspiration for a new generation of shops.

The age of Cooper Sharp had come.

In South Philly, the older shops have mostly kept to the formulas that made them famous, especially the world-beating aged-provolone steaks at stalwart John's Roast Pork, whose shop DiGiampietro admires. But in the city outskirts and suburbs, cheesesteak chef after cheesesteak chef now cites Angelo’s as a lodestar.

Carmela’s Maglio said they split the difference between John’s and Angelo’s to model their walloping 12-ounce cheesesteak — offering a pick of sharp provolone or Cooper on the same Carangi roll used by John’s, and incorporating a mountain of well-melted cheese.

In Pennsauken, baker Joe Argento asked DiGiampietro for advice on making the best cheesesteak roll when he and his wife took over Mama’s Meatball’s in 2020, adding cheesesteaks to the menu.

“He said ‘Sure: flour, water, salt and yeast,” Argento said.

That answer gave Argento the spur to create his distinctive take on a house-baked cheesesteak roll with imported Italian doppio flour, thickly crisped crust and an exterior more seeded than a tech startup.

Again and again, from Ochinili’s in Delaware to Meatheadz in Lawrenceville, New Jersey — whose co-owner Joseph Weintraub thinks he might be the only cheesesteak in Jersey with seeded Sarcone's bread — chefs cited Angelo’s as a shop that prodded them to make their own cheesesteaks better. And so each shop focused on high-end seeded bread from the old family bakeries. Premium meat. And, of course, Cooper Sharp cheese.

Recently, DiGiampietro said, the Wisconsin makers of Cooper Sharp took a trip to Angelo’s to see what all the fuss was about, telling him sales in the Philly area have skyrocketed since he opened his shop.

“They were really nice; they gave me a sweatshirt,” he said laughing. “I said, ‘This is a nice shirt. But you should really write me a royalty check.’'’

An 80,000-strong Facebook army brings seeds and Cooper to the masses

But if Angelo’s was a prime inspiration, many of those wildly popular suburban spots might have remained obscure if a guy named Bill Primwhere didn’t get bored during the pandemic.

He figured cheesesteaks might keep him occupied. In May 2020, he corralled 11 or so former classmates from Philly’s now-defunct Cardinal Dougherty high school to form a Facebook group called Cheesesteak Gurus, devoted to documenting their efforts to find the best takeout cheesesteaks in the Philly area.

Apparently, everyone else in Philly was bored, too.

From 10,000 members in the first year, Gurus has swelled to more than 80,000 ardent and argumentative cheesesteak fans, each one busy combing the region to find their own top 10 list of the best cheesesteaks in the area.

A funny thing happened: A sort of hive mind formed as to what constituted a proper cheesesteak.

Much like trends in beer (hazy) or tacos (birria) a few years back, cheesesteak hounds began chasing a specific model of cheesesteak: Seeded roll. Cooper Sharp. A landslide of meat and cheese, filling each hard roll to the brim.

“It is kind of the (hazy) IPA moment of cheesesteak these days,” said Guru member Chuck Creighton, polishing off a cheesesteak at Northeast Philly shop Joseph’s Pizza Parlor. “I think there has been an evolution over the years, and the page had something to do with it. It brought out what people were considering to be a bigger and better cheesesteak.”

And a new consensus started to emerge about what constituted the best shops. The famously unseasoned and fine-chopped beef at Roxborough's old-school Dalessandro's, winner of the Philadelphia Inquirer's reader poll in March as the city's best cheesesteak, rarely rates a mention. Nor do the old names of Tony Luke's, Jim's or Max's.

The pantheon is, instead, new.

Other than Angelo's and John's, most of the cheesesteaks prized by the 80,000-thick group reside in the city's far outskirts or outside Philly entirely.

This means Cafe Carmela and Stoli's in the city's deep Northeast. Curly’s and Berardi Bros and Loretta’s in Bucks County. Goomba’s and Gazzos in Montgomery County. Lillo’s and Mama’s and Meatheadz and Brynn Bradley in New Jersey.

Cheesesteak influencer Fanelli, for his part, agrees with this: Much of the momentum toward good cheesesteaks is happening outside Philadelphia, he said.

”When you look at my top 10, about half is in Bucks County, Montgomery County,” Fanelli said.

This social media fervor has helped a lot of newer spots get noticed. Curly’s owner Michael Sarian credits the Facebook group for propelling his Levittown shop’s vast popularity, helping grow his business to hundreds of steaks a day.

But you get the sense that Creighton, and another founding Guru, Steve Rossi, wonder whether they've helped create a hype monster. Many newer fans are just wowed by the size of a belly-busting steak, Rossi said, even if it's lost all proportion. And the pair see good old-school cheesesteak spots they love, like Oregon Steaks or Steve's Prince of Steaks, neglected by newer fans who judge a steak by how it looks on Instagram.

“I like a slab steak. But it doesn’t show up as well in pictures. People say, ‘Where’s the meat?’" Rossi said.

"I’d get slammed for this on the list, but I also think late-night Geno’s has a place," Creighton said.

"Pat’s and Geno’s have their place and they always will,” Rossi declared, with an air of finality.

Rossi has seen new cheesesteak makers “poking around” on the page to see what customers are looking for. And then they act accordingly, adding Cooper Sharp to their menus, sourcing seeded bread, and pumping up the volume on their sandwiches.

But not everyone does. After taking over classic Northeast Philly spot Joseph’s Pizza Parlor, co-owner Matthew Yeck said they also looked on social media, but went their own way. He eschewed Cooper Sharp he says overpowers the meat, and thinks of ribeye as too prone to gristle.

“You look at these pictures on Gurus, sometimes it’s just meat drowning in Cooper Sharp,” Yeck said.

Instead, he sought out prime-grade beef knuckle he says he’s found at only one South Philly butcher shop, precision-cut at a processor in Delaware to prettily marbled slabs — served on a custom Liscio's roll. It's a level of deliberation that might have seemed inconceivable even a few years ago, part of what Yeck sees as a "renaissance" in pizza and cheesesteaks.

At Angelo’s, DiGiampietro said he’s just happy to see cheesesteak shops all over the region source the best bread and the best cheese as they see it — and that this renewed attention by cheesesteak shops can only be a good thing.

“I’m happy for the evolution of the cheesesteak,” DiGiampietro said. “It’s comparable to a different version than what it was. And it was just fine the way it was. But now, with better bread and better cheese? It’s great.”

Matthew Korfhage is a Philadelphia-based writer with USA TODAY Network. Email him at mkorfhage@gannett.com or follow him on Twitter @matthewkorfhage.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY NETWORK: How Angelo's fueled a cheesesteak revolution from Jersey to Delaware