Jason made an offer I couldn’t refuse and took me to Amato’s to give them a review. What I found was a something so good, I’m surprised it hasn’t moved out of San Jose.

Amato’s Cheese Steaks

1162 Saratoga Ave.
San Jose, CA
(408) 246-2007
(map)

www.amatoscheesesteaks.com

So I’m living in San Jose for a month while working as the assistant stage director for Opera San Jose. Between my day job and the opera, I’m working from 8am until 10pm every day. I commute to the opera on my lunch break and have only a short time for dinner, thus I assumed the blog would have to wait a while until I could once again eat normal food.

Those of you unfamiliar with San Jose should also know that even with plenty of time, San Jose is not exactly gastronomic paradise- even for the amateur gourmand.

But lo and behold in southwestern San Jose there is a bastion of taste and grilled meaty goodness called Amato’s and the good men and women behind the counter work hard to serve up a mighty cheesesteak.

These cheesesteaks are so mighty I couldn’t even fit two of them in the same picture. See how the buns stick out over the edge? I stood two blocks away to take this picture and still couldn’t get both sandwiches to fit in the same frame!

What makes a mighty cheesesteak you ask. A gluttonous amount of beef serves as the foundation. It’s grilled up by a team of well greased cooks and slapped down on a spongy bun scientifically designed to resist sogginess through to the last bite. This is key since it will take you a substantial amount of time to finish their smallest hoagie which contains approximately 8 1/2 pounds of beef (measurements surmised from strength of post-meal food coma).

The next step is the cheese. I went with a regular where they use Swiss or some similar melty white cheese. Frankly the cheese is so melted and greasy you hardly taste anything specific about it (which is why I can handle it). The important measurement here is viscosity. Amatos uses a specially formulated cheese that can completely block the flow of blood in your arteries at melting temperature.

If you’ve built up an immunity to the house cheese and want to go old school with your cheesesteak you can go Jason’s route and go for the Whiz.

That’s right Cheez Whiz. I know you started out on this journey like I did, thinking it would be all about uppity French opera singer food. Now you see Cheez Whiz showing up on the Festivus G. If you want to know where it went wrong, it went wrong right about the time I started living in San Jose with no time for real food. This too will pass.

Actually, Amato’s is a helluva lot better than most of the East Coast joints I’ve tried. They serve it up big and tasty. Add a decent selection of beers and a wall of hot sauces (even if Crystal is their house sauce) and you get a pretty good dining experience for your buck. I think it totals out to something like 900 calories per dollar.

One final note, being in Silicon Valley and all, the nice woman behind the counter spotted my digital camera and instantly recognized me as a blogger. I gave her the address of the Festivus and she took the picture of Jason and I at the top. I guess I have to keep my game together while I’m here in the Valley.

• Festivus Gastronomicus Rating: Delecticus

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006 at 3:18 am and is filed under Reviews, $. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.