Famous Nathan (13 page)

Just in time, a coworker named Johnny Poa stopped Jimmy before he could make a fool of himself. “No, no, no! That's Nathan!” Poa explained that the boss was checking the quality of the hot dogs in the new shipment.

“How do you check on frankfurters by biting them and spitting them?”

“His taste buds are his only mechanism,” Poa said solemnly.

What was Nathan doing? There were several elements that sampling a “naked” (that is, without condiments) frankfurter might detect. One was relative texture of the casing, which had to be neither too tough nor too tender. The spice mixture that flavored the meat had to be just right. Another element was the amount of water in the meat filling. Ice was a natural ingredient in sausage preparation, used to cool down the product during the manufacturing process. The blades used to emulsify the meat into a smooth consistency heated up the filler, so ice was added to counteract the effect. Too much ice, though, led to watery dogs, which could result in annoying and even dangerous spatter when the franks were grilled.

Also vital was the exact fat-to-lean makeup of the meat.

“He had to get a certain percentage of fat,” recalled Murray Handwerker about his father's franks. “He could tell when you cooked it that the fat ran out. Nothing wrong with it—fat is fat. But he knew that they were not putting in the proper proportions if the fat ran out on the griddle.”

When the menu options at Nathan's Famous finally increased, the store maintained the same fierce approach to quality control. Hamburgers were introduced the second season after the store opened. Nathan hired butchers to grind the beef fresh on the premises. Crinkle-cut french fries—always referred to as “potato chips” in the early days—became big sellers. Nathan adhered to the principle that only quality ingredients make for quality food.

Said Hy Brown, a longtime manager at the store: “If he saw a batch of potatoes, he didn't care if it was ten thousand pounds of potatoes there, if they had black spots on it, he would put two, three, four, five people to take every spot out.”

Photographic evidence indicates that those early franks from Nathan's little resembled the soft, thin, skinless hot dogs prevalent in the current era. They were plumper and juicier and featured a delightful curve that poked out of the bun to give a promise of goodness. The little hand-tied knots at both ends of all the sausages were clearly visible. In size and shape, they appeared more like what we would recognize today as a kielbasa or a bratwurst.

On special busy summer holidays, such as the Fourth of July or Memorial Day, Nathan would actually increase the size of his franks. He'd order larger ones from his suppliers at Hygrade, going to six links to the pound instead of the usual seven. His theory was that the numberless customers on such busy days would remember the larger servings and become faithful repeat visitors to the store.

 

9

The Family (1)

“I always want to have all the Handwerkers together.” Family portrait
(clockwise from left)
: Murray, Ida, Nathan, Leah, and Sol.

BY 1925, THE
business had come to be called Nathan's Famous. Harry Wildman, the sign painter, now joined in the business by his son Lester, created a billboard atop the store. In a demonstration of permanency, the builders fabricated their creation out of wood, not oilcloth.

On the tail-end swoosh that ran off the terminal
n
in the name, Wildman added the phrase, “Famous frankfurter and soft drink stand.” Later the tag would be reduced to the simple modifier, “Famous.” Word had gotten out. People came from all over to visit Coney Island. Among the resort town's attractions was the busy frankfurter stand on Surf Avenue.

An excursion to Coney often went like this: Visitors exited the subway terminal and immediately headed to Nathan's Famous to buy a hot dog. They then continued on to the beach, perhaps sampling the demotic delights of the Bowery or Steeplechase Park along the way. When they left the beach at the end of the day, they visited Nathan's Famous once again for a second frankfurter. The store caught them coming and going.

For Nathan and Ida Handwerker, the business was family and the family was business. The line between the two entities blurred. They worked sixteen-, eighteen-, twenty-hour days, both of them on their feet much of the time, fierce in their determination to make the fledgling enterprise succeed. On the busy three-day holiday weekends in the summer, Nathan often never went home.

The work took its toll not only on his person but on his clothing. He always wore a traditional luncheonette uniform of white duck, sometimes—if important visitors were expected or if circumstances warranted—topped off with a black bow tie. Slaving over the stove was hell on fabric. Burn holes and grease stains were constants.

“He always wore his cuffs out, he ran around so much,” noted veteran Nathan's Famous employee Jay Cohen.

The damage extended even to his shoes.

Pat Auletta was a prominent Coney Island businessman and community figure who as a boy in the 1920s worked at the shoeshine stand in his father's barbershop. He recalled Nathan as a genial enough customer whose sturdy leather wing tips were a mess.

“It was a great challenge to give him a shine because he always had all this grease on his shoes, from the frankfurters and whatever else came off the grills,” Auletta remembered. Any shoe polish the boy applied would simply smear. Nathan would be too busy exchanging pleasantries with Auletta's father and the other customers to notice what was going on at ankle level.

“Every time he came in, I tried and tried to get that grease off his shoes,” Auletta said. “Someone suggested to me, ‘Why don't you try a match and burn it off?' So I did just that. He was talking to the barbers, so he had no idea what I was doing. The shoes went up in flame. I almost burned his whole leg, and I burned my fingers smothering out the fire.”

Such were the hazards of life for a dedicated frankfurter man. On rare occasions, Nathan would head over to Loew's Shore Theatre, directly across Surf Avenue from the store, and slip into the darkened interior for a nap. Otherwise, he seemed to be always busy, always working, always watching. He was, very simply, always at the store.

Nathan had a strict, almost obsessive hands-on approach to running his business. Vigilance was his byword. Though he eventually expanded the premises to include upstairs offices, he always remained very visible presence “on the floor,” in both the kitchen and the counter area.

Longtime employees referred to his habitual cigar as a mark of his presence. They'd smell the smoke and know that he was around. He would step into various nooks and recesses at the store. Workers would look up to be surprised to see the diminutive owner staring out at them, monitoring their movements.

“You never knew,” said one of his longtime employees. “You turned around and he was right behind you. He was quiet.”

“I trust myself and the stove,” Nathan said. “I don't trust anybody else.”

After leaving to have dinner at home with his wife, Nathan would at times return to the store later without warning. “I hate to see the manager walking around with a clean apron,” he would announce, checking the workers for signs they had been hard at it.

One young manager was aware of these late-evening sneak attacks, and while Nathan was absent, he would take off his apron and stomp on it to make it dirty. Nathan must have gotten wind of the trick, since he confronted the kid.

“I got to ask you a question,” Nathan said. “You're always working by the steam table. On the steam table, we've got barbecue gravy, which is red, and the roast beef gravy, which is brown. But you never have barbecue gravy or roast beef gravy on your apron. You have footprints.”

Nathan started to laugh, and because the guilty party was a good worker, he wrote the whole thing off as youthful high jinks. But the kid learned he'd have to get up pretty early in the morning to slip one past the boss.

During his last rounds at night, Nathan would often check the store's waste cans. He uncovered discarded frankfurters, pieces of meat that had been cut off along with the fat, half-empty bottles discarded with a portion of their contents unused. The next morning, he would confront this or that employee.

“I found too many french fries; what went wrong?” Or “I found some extra hamburgers; they shouldn't be there.” If he found anything amiss, Hy Brown recalls “the roof coming off the next day,” with the boss checking everything back to the source to figure out what might have happened. Nathan made it clear he was in the business of selling food, not throwing it away. He eventually had the insides of the waste cans painted white, so he could more easily ascertain their contents.

“He really resented wasting food,” recalled his grandson Steve Handwerker. “It's not an idiosyncrasy; it's a valid concern, not just on financial terms but as a moral issue. Because he grew up in a time when he had no food.”

The contents of the garbage pails represented the terminal end of the store's supply chain. Nathan paid strict attention to the opposite end, too, keeping close tabs on the wholesalers who delivered the food he served to his customers. Believing firmly that the sweetest potatoes came from Maine, he made excursions to the state himself, actually surveying the farm fields where the crop was being grown. It was almost as if he were replaying an experience of his youth, when he'd purchased a supply of potatoes from the Baron and returned with them in triumph to the spud-less Jarosław marketplace.

Eventually, he settled on a specific region—in the fertile valleys below the slopes of Maine's Mount Katahdin—where he found the best-tasting potatoes. He didn't buy them by the bushel, either, or even by the truckload. If he liked what he saw, Nathan would buy out a farm's entire crop. He had them shipped south via railroad and stored in warehouses. Eventually, it would take fourteen railway cars to transport a season's worth of potatoes.

His vigilance didn't end with these out-of-state trips. Nathan noticed that soaking potatoes in water leached some of the starch out of them, leaving behind the more concentrated sugars that made the tubers taste extra sweet. He instituted the water soak as part of the preparation process. Word got around about the matchless potato fries Nathan was serving. The man was simply not content to sell the normal, everyday fries that every other Coney Island outlet dished up. His had to be not ordinary but extraordinary. He went the extra mile—all the way to Maine—to make it happen.

Today, almost every french fry sold in the country is frozen first and then cooked. The average fast-food outlet never sees a real potato, one that does not arrive in the kitchen already cut and frozen. Frozen products provide ease of distribution, preparation, and storage. As with the roast chicken of Woody Allen's mother, the modern french fry has been “put through the de-flavorizer.” Current-day consumers might not be able to detect the difference between fresh and frozen.

But for Nathan, freshness mattered.

The same level of care went into every menu item. Nathan was always extremely cautious about adding new offerings beyond the frankfurters and fries that were his staples. An early entry to debut was a roast beef sandwich, added to the bill of fare soon after he and Ida were married.

“I cooked a piece of roast beef at home,” Nathan remembered. “I brought it into the store and put it on the griddle. I'd cut it on a board beside the griddle. Five cents a sandwich.”

Hamburgers were freshly made. Suppliers delivered beef hindquarters on hooks in the alleyway beside the store. Employees rolled them into a butcher section of the kitchen, where they would cut the meat and blend it. The ground beef went into a hand-cranked patty machine, which flattened the burgers and placed each one on its square of waxed paper. The top round of the beef hindquarters became the meat for the store's roast beef sandwiches.

As an all-cash business, much of it in coins, Nathan's Famous had serious money-handling concerns. In the beginning, Nathan could not afford cash registers. Countermen tossed the pennies, nickels, and dimes they received into open cigar boxes on the floor below them. Eventually, the workers adopted the kind of canvas aprons that newspaper vendors used, with three separate pockets for nickels, dimes, and quarters.

In the very early days of the business, Nathan would summon friends and family members to help tally the money, in festive communal sessions over beer and food. Counting the coins, packing them into paper money rolls, keeping track of the receipts—it all amounted to a major challenge for the new business. Paper currency was easier. Nathan simply placed it into a paper bag and walked it to the bank.

In any enterprise that deals in cash, employee theft is an obvious concern. The store was a sieve with money constantly tumbling through it. There were plenty of opportunities for workers to pluck a few dollars here and there. Even when Nathan finally installed cash registers, they failed to fully solve the problem.