Eagles are headed to London, where Philly has a culinary foothold: Cheesesteaks, citywides, and Beddia’s pizza

When thousands of Eagles fans arrive in London this week, they will find more than a football stadium temporarily dressed in green.

They will find cheesesteaks made with custom-baked rolls, citywide specials, and a series of Philadelphia-themed dive bars called Passyunk Avenue.

At the new Bar Etna, they can order pizza created by Joe Beddia, one of Philadelphia’s best-known pizzaioli and a partner in Fishtown’s Michelin-acclaimed Pizzeria Beddia.

Sunday’s match, scheduled for 2:30 p.m. at London’s Tottenham Hotspur Stadium (9:30 a.m. in Philadelphia), is officially a home game for the Jacksonville Jaguars. Around it, London will host nearly a week of Philadelphia-themed activity extending well beyond the NFL’s events. It shows a culinary connection between Philadelphia and London that has grown since the Birds last played there in 2018.

How Philly will this be? Even Wawa is involved.

The five-bar outfit Passyunk Avenue — founded in 2018 by New Jersey native JP Teti — has organized a three-day Wooderloo Terminal Market in the graffiti-lined tunnels beneath Waterloo Station. Modeled after Reading Terminal Market, the event will feature food vendors, bars, vintage merchandise, and entertainment from Thursday through Saturday.

Passyunk Avenue also will host an Eagles tour of London on a red double-decker bus Saturday, handing out its cheesesteaks near Parliament Square, Trafalgar Square, the Tower of London, and Tower Bridge. The bar will hold a game-day street party Sunday outside its original location in Fitzrovia and a procession through central London on Monday.

By phone this week, Teti described it as a victory parade, although he said it would proceed regardless of the score.

Teti, who grew up in Lawrenceville, Mercer County, moved to London in 2008 to oversee Middle Eastern and African operations for Xerox. He had spent a year in England while studying at Cambridge University, an experience that made him determined to build a life outside the United States.

The restaurant idea began with what he could not find in London.

“Coming from a South Philly Italian American ethnic inheritance, I think about food constantly,” Teti said. “I wondered why, in a city as diverse as London, you couldn’t get hoagies, cheesesteaks, chicken parms, and so on.”

He also missed Philadelphia’s neighborhood bars. English pubs fill a similar social role, he said, but lack the particular combination of informality, intimacy, and eccentricity that he associated with such places as McCusker’s Tavern, Oscar’s Tavern, and Ray’s Happy Birthday Bar.

Teti believed that Europeans were interested in American culture but were usually offered “very general, broad-brush attempts to describe what other people thought Americana was, based on movies and television, rather than what our experience was.”

Passyunk Avenue, he said, would instead present one specific region, including its food, sports, language, immigrant traditions, and citywide specials.

The first Passyunk Avenue opened in the Fitzrovia neighborhood in March 2018. Teti now operates bars in Fitzrovia, Waterloo, Battersea, and Kensington, along with Passyunk Play, a game-focused offshoot with batting cages, shuffleboard, pool tables, and a self-serve beer wall. This week, he signed a lease to bring Passyunk Avenue to Amsterdam, where he now lives.

Although American expatriates became loyal customers, Teti said they were never his primary audience. He built the business for the “Americana-curious Europeans” who might never have visited Philadelphia but were attracted to a detailed, idiosyncratic version of it.

The Eagles’ 2018 visit, seven months after the first bar opened, heightened the appeal.

The team asked to hold an event at Passyunk Avenue but could not publicize it because of the NFL’s relationship with another pub operator, he said. Shortly before the event, an NFL security representative arrived and told Teti that the Lombardi Trophy was coming.

Teti suggested putting it on the back bar. The representative told him that the trophy could not be photographed near alcohol, so Teti cleared the bottles away. “About 25 minutes later, [Eagles tight end] Brent Celek carried the Lombardi Trophy into our first site, put it on the back bar, and became an impromptu bartender,” Teti said. “He served beers for the next 45 minutes.”

The restaurant’s growth required Teti to reproduce Philadelphia foods without access to Philadelphia’s supply chain. A London bakery makes the rolls from Passyunk Avenue’s recipe. Its beef once had to be custom-cut by a butcher in the Netherlands because thinly shaved rib eye was not commonly available in Britain. The bars make their own cheese sauce, Buffalo sauce, ranch, and blue cheese dressing.

Not every Philadelphia staple translated immediately. Roast pork sandwiches, cannoli, and ricotta cheesecake have moved on and off the menu after selling more slowly than cheesesteaks, chicken Parmesan sandwiches, and wings.

“We don’t give up entirely,” Teti said. “People don’t know what they’re missing.”

London’s Philadelphia food presence expanded again this spring when Bar Etna opened at 47 Newington Green, a half-hour from Tottenham Stadium. Beddia is a partner with Mike Stampler, a former Philadelphia designer, and British chef and restaurateur Ed McIlroy, whose Four Legs group operates the Plimsoll and Tollington’s fish bar.

Stampler, formerly of the Philadelphia denim company Norman Porter, moved to London about five years ago. He and McIlroy were considering restaurant spaces when they found one in a neighborhood that Beddia said had relatively little pizza.

“They asked, ‘Do you want to do this with us?’” Beddia said. “I said, ‘Absolutely.’ It was kind of a no-brainer for me.”

Bar Etna’s pizzas resemble those at Pizzeria Beddia, though they are 14 inches instead of 16 to fit the smaller restaurant and its tables. (Metric apparently is not a thing in the pizza world.) The most popular pizzas have been a plain pie and a cream-based pizza with garlic, Calabrian chilies, and greens. Beddia also specifically developed a spicy curry-flavored pizza inspired by saag paneer.

The dough proved more difficult to transplant. Importing the Utah-made Central Milling flour used in Philadelphia would have been too expensive, so Bar Etna uses British flours from Shipton Mill and Wildfarmed.

Beddia had less than two weeks between the completion of the kitchen and the restaurant’s opening. He said it took about 12 days of testing to produce dough that met his standards. “It was a nightmare,” Beddia said. “We were down to the last couple of days before we had it.”

Beddia spent two months in London preparing Bar Etna and plans to return during Eagles week.

His larger interest is in seeing how the restaurant has settled into a city that he believes is undergoing a pizza revival. London historically offered either mass-market delivery pizza or Neapolitan pies, he said, but has acquired an appetite for the crisper, more structurally firm American style.

Beddia sees a parallel with Philadelphia, which had deep Italian bakery, pastry, and sandwich traditions but, aside from establishments such as Tacconelli’s, lacked a pizza identity as distinctive as those of New York or New Haven until relatively recently.

For Passyunk Avenue’s Teti, the goal is not to suggest that Philadelphia, or the United States, can be reduced to cheesesteaks and football. It is to offer Londoners a specific place and culture rather than another generic American theme. Plus, he said he is more about turning Passyunk Avenue into a global brand.

“We hope Passyunk Avenue’s presentation of this nostalgic form of America — not necessarily what America is, but perhaps the best of what America has been and could be again — can be a bit of a light in the darkness,” he said.