Joe Vento, the founder and owner of Geno's Steaks, can be accused of a lot of things, but being subtle is certainly not one of them. Every time you visit ,he's managed to find another space on his walls to put up another neon sign. This isn't necessarily bad, as it reflects Joe's character pretty well, and I'm sure that more than a few drunk college students have been glad to see those familiar lights in the distance as they aimlessly wandered around the Italian Market trying to find cheesesteak Mecca.

The lights are a part of Geno's, and we recognized this throughout the redesign proces. Sure, our ideas are very different from what's there at the moment, but we didn't want to take the essence of Pat's and Geno's and just throw them out of the window...


Pat's, on the other hand, is more of a blank slate. They have a look, but they also seem to have changed a lot less over the years. Except for a few of the signs, you can easily imagine Pat's today looking very similar to how it did in the 1950s. For this reason, Pat's has to be approached in a different way. A lot of people are turned off by the flash over at Geno's. In fact, as Frank Oliveri, owner of Pat's, once said "you can't eat flash."