Many think that fast food was invented by Ray Kroc when he opened his first McDonald’s in Des Plaines, Illinois, in 1955. But it is probably Nathan Handwerker who deserves the distinction, argues his grandson Lloyd Handwerker in his new book Famous Nathan (in 2014 Handwerker made a documentary film with the same name). Nathan founded his hot dog stand, Nathan’s Famous, in 1916 at the corner of Surf and Stillwell Avenues in Coney Island. It was called a “grab joint”—the term “fast food” wouldn’t arrive until the 1950s. “Give ’em and let ’em eat!” Nathan called to his troops as they made “the sweep”: There were no lines at the Nathan’s counter, just a hungry horde served by countermen who served up dogs at the speed of light. By 1916 the hot dog was already a craze in America: Babe Ruth boasted of eating two dozen at a time with a gallon of lemonade.
The inventor of this American gastronomic ritual, Nathan Handwerker, was born in 1892 in Narol, a shtetl in Austro-Hungarian Galicia. The Handwerkers were desperately poor, with 13 children, and Nathan’s father, a shoemaker down on his luck, had to go begging from town to town to make ends meet. At age 11, Nathan got a job in a nearby town at a bakery, where he slept near the oven and had to wake at midnight to prepare the dough.
By 19, Nathan was on a boat headed for America. Six months after his arrival he was working at Max’s Busy Bee, a luncheonette counter in Manhattan. A few months later, Nathan took one of his cousins to a day at the beach. They took the trolley down Ocean Parkway to Coney Island, strolled around the glittering attractions of the world’s most famous amusement park, and bought Cracker Jacks, sometimes called “the first junk food.”
Coney Island stuck in Nathan’s head. He wanted some extra hours on the weekends, when business at Max’s was slow. What better place than Coney Island? He went to Feltman’s restaurant on Surf Avenue, just across from Luna Park, “the Heart of Coney Island,” and got a job as a roll-cutter. Charles Feltman, an immigrant from Germany, was probably the one who, some time in the late 1860s, first served up that brilliant snack: a frankfurter on a warm bun. Feltman’s creation wasn’t called a “hot dog” but a “dachshund sandwich” or a “Coney Island red hot.” Unlike today’s skinless franks, they had sheep’s gut casings tied at both ends like a bratwurst, making a satisfying snap when a hungry customer took the first bite. On a good summer day Feltman’s might serve 40,000 dachshund sandwiches.
Before long, Handwerker had quit his job in the city and opened up his own store in Coney Island. Shrewdly, he lowered the price of his dog to just 5 cents, compared to Feltman’s 10. Most important of all, Nathan ran a grab and go counter, not a sit-down restaurant like Feltman’s. Nathan had intuited the future of American dining: eating on the run, for cheap.
Random stuff I find interesting and you may not.
