Is gas-station cheesesteak Fresno’s new foodie success? Willy’s Phillys opens 3rd location

Wilson Tadros comes off as having a certain amount of confidence about his restaurant, especially knowing that people don’t typically go into gas stations looking to try the food.

It’s all in that first taste.

“Just try us once and you can make the choice,” says Tadros, the chef/owner and OG Willy at Willy’s Phillys, a cheesesteak shop that opened in late March inside the Zippy Mart on Herndon Avenue near Highway 99.

Tadros runs the grill from behind a chromed-out counter near the entrance of the store. The specialty is cheesesteaks, obviously, with slight variations on the theme.

Willy’s Way is the baseline: a large 12-inch sandwich packed with steak, onions, mushrooms, green pepper, mayonnaise, lettuce, tomatoes and provolone cheese.

The Raider adds jalapeños.

The Cowboy has A1 Steak Sauce and swaps out the provolone for American cheese.

The Niner is made with chicken, chipotle sauce and Swiss cheese.

The Big Buffalo has crispy chicken and a ranch cheese buffalo sauce.

There’s also a whole section of the menu for potatoes, which are cut on site daily. If you pay attention you can find the slicer mounted to the wall on one side of the counter.

You can get french fires and tater tots or loaded (and double loaded) versions of the same.

It’s essentially a deconstructed cheesesteak for those who don’t want to order the sandwich, Tadros says. It’s popular with the younger set.

There are also some gas-station food staples on the menu. Think corn dogs and pizza pockets.

Any confidence Tadros has is bolstered by the fact that this is actually the third location Tadros and his three children have opened in the past six months.

They opened the first inside the Valero gas station at Cedar and McKinley avenues in November and a second spot on Manning Avenue in Parlier (also inside a Valero). The three locations have essentially the same menu, though each has its own secret sandwich.

Tadros won’t say what they are.

“You have to ask the kids,” he says.

By that he means his children, who handle the branding and marketing of Willy’s Phillys, but more generally the community of people pushing Fresno’s food culture on social media.

“Social media plays a big part in all this.”

The brand got a major boost on social media thanks to a visit from TikTok personality Mikey the Foodie Guy, who chronicled an impromptu trip to the spot in November. He called the loaded fries, “off the chain, bro. I’m not even exaggerating.”

“He came in and the next thing you know, we had 100K views,” Tadros says.

They parlayed that energy by offering discounts to anyone who found about the spot through Mikey.

Tadros is from Chicago, where he did some restaurant work before moving to Fresno to get a corporate job nearly a decade ago. It was his children — and the pandemic — that convinced him to get back into cooking and start the family business as a way for all to stay close.

The fact they ended up in a gas station — three of them — was mostly about opportunity, and keeping down the initial start-up costs. They ended up on Herndon Avenue because Tadros saw the potential in the location.

People kept coming into the other store from this part of town.

Whether they’ll move on from the gas station set-up at some point, Tadros doesn’t know. People keep suggesting that Willy’s Phillys open a food truck and that possibility is there, he says.

But not before the brand adds locations into other parts of Fresno and the Valley: “I want to have 10 by the end of the year.”