The important thing to know about Danny & Coop’s, the new Philly-cheesesteak restaurant in the East Village co-owned by Bradley Cooper, of the piercing blue eyes and the considerable acting-directing chops, is this: the cheesesteak is good. It’s very good. It’s a hefty twelve-incher, the roll split lengthwise and filled with a glorious gloop of cheese (smooth and saucy Cooper Sharp, no relation to Bradley) and sliced rib-eye steak (tender, velvet-soft, paper-thin) run through with sweet ribbons of griddled onion. It’s the best cheesesteak I’ve had in New York, which isn’t saying much; it’s just as good as the best one I’ve had in Philadelphia, which is saying plenty.
Cooper’s partner at Danny & Coop’s is the chef-cum-baker turned restaurateur Danny DiGiampietro, of Angelo’s Pizzeria, which makes the best cheesesteak I’ve had in Philadelphia. Opened in 2019, Angelo’s is a bold, baldly ambitious newcomer in a city that (like all cities) can at times be self-defeatingly in love with its own traditions. The restaurant serves terrific pizza and even better cheesesteaks that draw long lines running down the street or, some days, up the street the other way, just to keep life interesting. DiGiampietro’s focus on quality (“He just makes perfect food,” a fan once raved in the Philadelphia Inquirer) upended a cheesesteak field stultified by the sodium-laden clichés of “wit’ wiz” and gummy industrial steak. His high standards for the insides of the sandwich are a fair part of Angelo’s magic, but the real miracle is his bread: graceful torpedoes of flour and yeast and dough, the crust baked to a crisp, autumnal golden-brown and dusted with sesame seeds, the interior both soft and dense, sour and salty. Most bread used for cheesesteaks tastes like nothing; it serves as a container and a handhold. DiGiampietro’s bread tastes like bread, like sun on a wheat field, like the mysteries of fermentation, like salt and steam and the hot, mysterious darkness of the oven.
