Nobody has mastered how to pin a continuous topic at the top of the discussion board. First 2 should be, PARTICIPATING IN LEHIGH WRESTLING, #2 Best Cheesesteaks.
Getting back to cheesesteaks. A few years ago when driving cross country to my old home in Wyoming, i stopped off highway on I-65 to this place called Mt. Hood Pizza and Grill in a small Indiana college town of Rensselaer, IN.
With my daughter and son-in-law, so being from PA originally, I see he has cheesesteak. My experience is I never had anything that resembled a real cheesesteak west of Harrisburg, PA. So we order a large pizza and a cheesteak for us to at least sample, but we were expecting to have to chuck it, give previously times along the highway in OH and the old RAX Restaurant chain of a slab of meat and a slice of cheese on top.
Order comes out, it looks like a Philly Cheesesteak with onions, peppers and mushroom, even provolone cheese. We eat the pizza and it is out of this world. So I asked the young owner, maybe in his late 30s or early 40s come over. I tell him I have to ask him two questions: 1) Why Mt. Hood Pizza in the flatlands of farming Indiana? 2) Where the hell did you learn to make an authenticate cheesesteak.
He tells me he grew up in the town. When he graduated college, he worked in Elkhart, IN in the RV business, specifically running rails for truck customization. He was in sales. There was slowdown in economy and lost his job. He always dreamed of seeing mountains and being a big former LB in college football, he went west to take a job as a trainee lumberjack in Oregon forests. After a couple of years doing that man work, he rethought his career options and took at job at Mt. Hood, OR resort as a waiter. He met another young guy from South Philly, Italian kid, and they opened up a pizza delivery business off the front porch of their cabin they rented with an electric pizza oven. The Philly kid came from a family that ran a pizza joint in South Philly. After a year, they save enough and rented some storespace and ran a restaurant for a few years and hence the addition of the Cheesesteak to Mt. Hood, OR. They both eventually got married and made their way back to where they grew up.
So the menu on the website of Mt. Hood Pizza in IN is the same as it was when they had the porch operation and then the small little storefront Pizza place in Mt. Hood, OR. So, still Mr. Hood Pizza.
So if you are ever riding down from Chicago toward Indianapolis, after Merrillville, IN/Crown Point, IN the last of the Chicagoland suburbs in Indiana, you start hitting the exits for these small farming towns, of which Rensselaer is one of them. They used to have a small Catholic college there, St. Joseph's University (IN), but now defunct. The kid's father was former Associate Head Football Coach, but his father died at a young age when the young man was only about 8 years old.
On the road, I do like to meet real Americans and hear their stories. Hard working kid. Cheesesteak can rival the well knows of Pat's, Gino's, Jim's of South Philly. It was a pleasant surprise.