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Benjamin Franklin, the consummated colonial tramp, once observed that the home was not just a place, one thing or a food. “A house is not a home,” he said, “unless it contains fire for the mind, as well as for the body.”
Centuries later, JP Teti, the accidental ambassador of Philadelphia in England, has also learned this: a city, no, a town, cannot survive only in cheese with cheese.
If the American power seat in London resides at the embassy, you can find a good part of its spirit on Cleveland Street in downtown London, interspersed between traditional British architecture, in the form of a sandy diving bar of Philly: Avenue Passyunk, named for the famous road in southern Philadelphia.
Entering is being transported. The pendants of the Philadelphia schools frame the windows; T -shirts and t -shirts hang from the beams. Bills of dollar with scribbled firms on paper from the walls. Among the many American bars manufactured in London, Passyunk Avenue is distinguished by the simple fact that it is not a trick.
The creation of Mr. Teti, the bar is a Mecca for US sports fans away from home. Cozy, strident and largely drawn from the famous sports obsession of Philadelphia, Passyunk Avenue attends to almost any person who expects to see conventional US sports. But it has cornered an emerging market: the NFL, which It is emerging in popularity among the international public. Commissioner Roger Goodell has said that it is Hope that the League can expand abroad And, one day, even see a Super Bowl played in Europe.
However, such high aspirations feel away from the comfortable hanger of a Passyunk Avenue bar stool this week, days before the Philadelphia Eagles march to a championship rematch with the Kansas City bosses. Sitting between Tchotchkes and trophies, it is not really about football or Cheesteaks. It is never In fact It has been about any of that.
‘We are not a sports bar. We are a diving bar.
Mr. Teti recalls exactly where he was in January 2018, just before the last (and first) victory of the Super Bowl of Philadelphia: pain and dejected under a railroad arch in southeastern London, packing his incipient cheese truck for always.
The truck had been a brief experiment for Mr. Teti, who grew divided between the south of New Jersey and southern Philadelphia, where he had a group of Italian cousins, before moving to London to work. Convinced that he could win the city, he moved away from his corporate work in 2016 on the commitment that the British could reach the attractiveness of Philadelphia of the famous Philadelphia sandwich.
But the fillets of a trailer had not fostered the community that Mr. Teti expected.
“This is not what I imagined,” he said he thought at that time. “I want to get him away from being Cheesteaks. We will create an advanced cultural position in the form of a philadelphia diving bar. “
Despite the many pubs in downtown London, an authentic immersion could not feel further. That has not prevented many pubs from trying, but efforts often feel like an American Disneyland legion. Lost are the details tested over time, they were only lost once they are at an ocean away: the flashing neon. Football in the background. The rubber and shameless stools take strange charlatans.
These little touches are taken seriously in Philadelphia, where Diving bar culture prior to the country itselfand words like “sand” and “dirt” are less nonsense than the badges of honor. (A bar from the city of Atlantic once sued the magazine Philadelphia after a critic called him an “immersion.” According to the magazine editor: “This is a case of a place that cannot receive a compliment”).
At risk of throwing tea in the proverbial port: the culture of the pub is not the same.
With a renewed sense of purpose, Mr. Teti rented a space in the neighborhood of Fitzrovia in London and opened its doors in March 2018. The business, known as Liberty Cheesteak Company when he ran out of a truck, was renamed as Passyunk Avenue After the main artery of South Philly, where Rocky Balboa trained and where Pat’s and Geno’s (overvalued) Cheesteak’s houses still free their generational war. Mr. Teti had bought the name as a domain of the website in a whim years before.
“I’m not selling Cheesteaks. It has always been, for me, to share the cultural inheritance that made my education special, ”said Teti, hunched on a wooden table in the location of Passyunk Avenue Fitzrovia. Now it is one of the three, which will soon be four, locations, all of which have hundreds of depth for Sunday’s game, despite the local start time of 11:30 pm. This Super Bowl is very different here, now, than in 2018.
“It really shouldn’t have survived six months,” Teti said about his bar, laughing. “But he did.”
‘This is Philadelphia, from beginning to end’
Passyunk Avenue is not just about Cheesteaks, and, like Mr. Teti and any life -like philadelphia fan, rightly bitter, Eagles are not just about football. Lombardi is more holy grail than trophy, the end of what can only be described as an emotional pilgrimage. In fact, the eagles are less hobbies than religion, so inherent to the collective identity of the city as Benjamin Franklin, as soul music, like a The whole city Served from a scratched counter on Two Street.
Mr. Teti’s bar is an obedient disciple. Makes harassed night licenses to solve the problem of time difference for American games. The bar found a Dutch butcher who can cut the steak in the right way and developed his own genius when British food codes would not let real things in (?).
“This is a very specific American, do you know what I mean?” Jessi Riley said, native to the South Jersey and Head of Culture of the franchise. “This is Philadelphia, from beginning to end.”
Passyunk Avenue has good faith full of stars. The Kelce brothers, including the retired center of the Jason Águilas, once recorded their popular “New Height” podcasts of the bar. The Philis Manager, Rob Thomson, arrested to pull the pints When the team played a series in London last year. Brent Ceek, the closed wing of the eagles withdrawn, Once celebrated there with the Lombardi trophy.
But Passyunk Avenue’s royal credentials are their walls, without a naked sight. It is a sea of the familiar: scribbled messages like “Delco” or “Wooder del Crick”, in tribute to the famous accent of Philadelphia. A jacket of the South Jersey march band. A reusable Wawa shopping bag, perfectly wrinkled as if it were taken from a rear seat and glued to the wall.
(A poison poisoned once he left with what, for a stranger, he probably seemed to be an harmless accessory: a teddy eagle head. It was, in fact, Swoop’s donated costume head, Eagles’ official pet. Internationally vilified by online philadelphia fansThe mortified man returned his head, unharmed, the next day).
Each decoration piece, said Mrs. Riley, was often donated by customers so moved by the feeling that they took a back shirt at the bar.
“I have worked in several museums,” said Riley, a historian by profession. “I feel that I provide more culture in this place than ever in any museum where you have worked.”
‘Go Birds’
I vigined to Passyunk Avenue for the first time on Tuesday before the Super Bowl, gloomy and precipitating for the Wiot Week of Philadelphia. I left the city years ago, but I have returned regularly to see great games with my brother. Testified by an ocean, we will pass this separate super bowl.
The home is not a Cheesteak, or even a football team. Instead, I found it in the subtleties of this Dive Fitzrovia, reserved only for those who know: the soft stretching of a “or”, which makes it “”Owh. “The” I “casual, as score and separation. The soft”SHH ” That Mr. Teti joins the second syllable of “passyunk”.
This is deep, for anyone who has left a place that loves.
Mrs. Riley will see Sunday’s game in the same jacket of the 90s start team that she has had for decades: she takes it out of a chair and shows the tag of internal name, which still carries the echo of a children’s scribble. Mr. Teti will be in the Leake Street tunnel, near the Passyunk Avenue Battersea location. There, they have organized a rear -style party, in tribute to the scene prior to the game in Lincoln Financial Field, the Eagles home stadium.
At the bar, we move away from the predictions, cautious of Jinxes. I will return for a Cheesteak soon, I commit, pressing the door forward in the gray cold of London.
“They go to the birds,” I say on my shoulder.
Behind me, a family choir and separation: Go birds.
