The First Hamburger

The question of who invented the hamburger has been contested for more than a century, and New Haven has its entry in the argument. At two sixty-one Crown Street there is a small lunch counter called Louis' Lunch. It has been in operation since eighteen ninety-five, when a Danish immigrant named Louis Lassen began selling butter and eggs from a pushcart and eventually added cooked food to his trade.

According to the restaurant's account, the hamburger was born here in nineteen hundred. A customer came in asking for something quick, a lunch to go. Lassen took a blend of ground steak trimmings he had on hand, placed a patty in one of his cast iron vertical broilers, the kind that cook the meat on both sides simultaneously, and served it between two slices of toast. The Library of Congress recognized Louis' Lunch as the originator of the hamburger in two thousand.

The cast iron broilers are the originals. The Bridge and Beach Company made them in eighteen ninety-eight. The steel wire gridirons that hold the patties were patented in nineteen thirty-eight. They are still in use.

The challengers to Louis' claim are real and numerous: Charlie Nagreen at a Wisconsin county fair in eighteen eighty-five, the Menches brothers in Ohio around the same time, Oscar Weber Bilby in Oklahoma in eighteen ninety-one. The core of the dispute is usually definitional, is a hamburger only a hamburger if served on a bun, which would exclude the toast? The critic Josh Ozersky put the toast objection most directly, arguing that if you say it can be on toast, you are essentially redefining the hamburger out of existence.

Louis' Lunch is still open. They still serve it on toast. They do not serve ketchup.