LOUIS' LUNCH was recognised by the Library of Congress as the birthplace of the Hamburger Sandwich in America, so we just had to visit during our brief time in New Haven, Connecticut.
Family-run since 1895, Louis’ Lunch for the last 116-ish years has closed down for a month each August (except in 2020) for the “counting of the spoons” - no idea - and we got there just in time on Wednesday July 31 2024, for Louis’ was due to shutdown the very next day.
We turned up nice and early, as we’d seen how busy the small restaurant got from watching videos online. An older American couple - Jackie and Brad - were first in line in front of us, and we excitedly struck up a conversation about what the unique food from Louis’ was going to be like.
When the doors opened at noon, we eagerly stepped inside and took in the wood-panelled room. To describe it as a shack or a hut would be misleading, but it was certainly from a different era.
We could see the guy making the hamburger patties, while another fella took the orders. Family members or friends of the proprietors were sat in a back room and when we later spoke to them they thought we were Irish!
Louis’ Lunch keeps things simple. In fact the handmade hamburgers, made from five cuts of beef, are cooked on ancient cast iron grills, dating from 1898, and served in white bread from the 1929 toaster. Fixings are a very simple tomato and onion. No sauces.
The hamburgers are typically served medium rare and first came about in 1900 when Louis Lassen invented a way to give his customers a quick and mobile meal: a ground beef patty served between two slices of bread.
All food at Louis’ Lunch is cooked to order and you can wait a long while. Our hamburgers arrived after 20 minutes, but the time in the hot restaurant flew over as we shared a table with Jackie and Brad and our conversations about life in America and England helped pass the time.
We sampled as many things on the short menu as we could, as we knew this would truly be a one-off visit:
🍔 Hamburger
🍔 Cheeseburger
🥔 Potatoe-salid
🥔 Potato chips
🥧 Appul pie
🥧 Bloo-beri pie
🥤 Root beers x 2
💰 Total cost = $38.00
Honest thoughts on the hamburgers: they were okay.
The hamburger had a salty taste and the cheeseburger was much the same, but the cheese did make it better. In fact, they tasted homemade! Which I guess they were.
The side of potatoe-salid was very good. It was in fact a mix of potatoes, boiled eggs, celery and maybe onion with mayonnaise. It was full of flavor and we are going to try and recreate it at home.
The juicy fruit pies were demolished pretty quickly and it was all washed down with cold root beers. How very American. How very historic!
Our new American friends, Jackie and Brad, couldn’t manage all of their food and they kindly shared half of their hamburger. Jackie even offered us her umbrella or a ride somewhere as she knew a storm was forecast later in the day. We politely declined and explained that we were made of stern stuff and planned to be nice and dry inside a museum when the rain arrived (the storm came much, much later when we were indoors enjoying drinks).
Louis’ Lunch, quite rightly, has become famous for its historic link to the invention of the American hamburger; the restaurant was full of folks TikToking, blogging, photographing and posting pics of their meals. We joined in and tried to get some good shots to share on our own blog.
Ten hours later, in the dark, after we’d well and truly walked our meals off and had explored New Haven and Yale, we passed by Louis’ Lunch which had just closed for the night.
We peeked inside.
The gentleman who had served us at 12 o’clock was still in there, cleaning and tidying up. He’d put in a long shift. But the next day Louis’ Lunch was to close for the fabled “counting of the spoons”. We hoped he’d have a well deserved rest after all the folks he’d fed with original American hamburgers!
