The True Story Behind The Very First Restaurant To Sell Hamburgers

Despite how prevalent hamburgers are in American culture today, not many of us could actually say where they were first sold. Some would guess hamburgers were first sold at the first fast food restaurant or alongside the first french fries. The truth is far more complicated than that.

The Library of Congress has crowned Louis' Lunch as the first restaurant to serve hamburger sandwiches. Located in New Haven, Connecticut, this historical restaurant has been serving hamburgers for over 100 years. The restaurant is best known for its vertical cast iron broilers, which have been used to make hamburgers since 1898.

Louis' Lunch is often credited as the place where hamburgers were invented, but that is not entirely true. While the restaurant can certainly take credit for selling hamburgers to the masses, and doing so for quite an extended period of time, hamburgers go back further than the restaurant's initial founding in 1895. Still, Louis' Lunch is a cornerstone in American culinary history and should absolutely be thanked for helping bring hamburgers to hungry customers for decades on end.

Several restaurants and cities have fought over the title of "birthplace of the hamburger sandwich." While other places, including a farm stand in Wisconsin served hamburgers before Louis' Lunch, what Louis' Lunch does deserve credit for is serving hamburgers longer than anyone else. Considering the restaurant is still operating to this day and it first opened in 1895, that is a hard record to beat.

As for how Louis' Lunch started serving hamburgers, the story goes that a customer in a hurry walked into Louis' Lunch one day and requested something that he could eat on the go. Supposedly, Louis Lassen, the proprietor of Louis' Lunch, put ground steak between two pieces of toast. The rest is history.

One thing customers have noted since then is that Louis' Lunch does hamburgers somewhat differently. To this day, their hamburgers are made with two pieces of toast rather than a potato roll or hamburger bun. It is certainly a different way of doing things but is also part of what made Louis' Lunch iconic and what makes the dish fun to sample for foodie historians.