​​The Murky Origins Of The Iconic Reuben Sandwich

The Reuben sandwich is an iconic American dish, and whoever decided that combining corned beef, Swiss cheese, sauerkraut, and Russian or Thousand Island dressing on rye bread deserves serious credit. But good luck figuring out who deserves that recognition, as there are at least two competing backstories for who invented the Reuben, hailing from opposite parts of the country. This is hardly a unique situation, either — both the banana split and Buffalo wings have similarly disputed histories, as there aren't many official records on this kind of thing.

One such history says the Reuben hails from New York, and the other credits Omaha, Nebraska. The NYC story is straightforward: Restaurateur Arnold Reuben owned a deli (also called Reuben's) near the Theater District, and he created it in 1914 for actress Annette Seelos, who was known for starring in Charlie Chaplin films. But there's a catch: Seelos wanted a sandwich that combined lots of ingredients, and the one Reuben devised had ham, turkey, coleslaw, Russian dressing, and Swiss — notably, no beef or sauerkraut.

Those who believe this history sometimes point out that the sandwich appeared in a cookbook that a New Yorker wrote, but this was in the '40s, long after the sandwich had supposedly been created in Nebraska (more on that in a moment). There are variations of this story, including that it was made at the same deli but for the owner's son in the late '20s, but this also post-dates the Nebraska story by a few years.

The other claim to the Reuben hails from Omaha around 1925. This should automatically invalidate any New York claims from after that date — but there's also some debate around this story. This story claims that the sandwich came from the city's Blackstone Hotel (pictured above), where a group of businessmen regularly gathered to play poker. One player, grocery store owner Reuben Kulakofsky, requested a corned beef-sauerkraut sandwich, and chef (and the hotel owner's son) Bernard Schimmel riffed on this by adding the Swiss and dressing. He grilled it and reportedly served it with a dill pickle and chips, as you'll often get today. It was a hit, and ended up on the hotel menu, with the Reuben name honoring the customer who ordered it.

The sandwich didn't get big until the '50s, when a server from the restaurant entered it into a national sandwich competition, where it won, leading to the sandwich popping up all over the country. The controversial part of this story is the question of who gets credit. It's sometimes asserted that Schimmel really invented it (with Kolakofsky having just asked for a more generic beef sandwich), but Kolakofsky's family has claimed that Schimmel simply delivered deli platter ingredients to the poker players and that Kolakofsky then created the actual sandwich. The Omaha story is considered more plausible, as the NYC version involves a quite different sandwich — but as for who deserves the actual credit, that's still up for debate.