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In Los Angeles, the King of fast food chili restaurants is Tommy's Original.
The Original Tommy’s (from the company
About page)
On May 15, 1946, a young Tommy Koulax introduced Los Angeles to a hamburger with gusto. Years later, L.A.’s love affair with his chili-topped creation is still going strong. Beginning with a ramshackle little stand on the corner of Beverly and Rampart Boulevards in Los Angeles, Tommy has fed an estimated fifty million Southern Californians. [some of them hundreds of times! -- speaking from personal experience]
The original stand today serves as the company logo and for good reason. Although there are now many Tommy’s locations throughout Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside, San Diego and Ventura counties in California and Clark County in Nevada, none compare with the huge popularity of the original Beverly location. Alone, it serves thousands of customers each week. It’s why we say, “If you don’t see the shack - take it back!”
(They're being 'modest' -- it should say thousands
a day.)
They even have a mobile version, available at several of their 32 locations in greater Los Angeles (Southern California), emblazoned with the registered slogan,
"If you don't see the shack, take it back."
"Today, there are many Tommy’s Original locations throughout Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura, San Bernardino, San Diego, Riverside and Nevada’s Clark County." (from
the company website)
Note, this list of 7 counties covers an area larger than any other 14 contiguous counties in the contiguous 48 United States. The sentence does not literally say "counties," but that is what it is referring to, because all of the cities listed are the same as their respective county names.
From the mid-1950's into the 1970's the popularity and expansion of Tommy's restaurants grew in great strides, however, the immense appeal of the original "Shack" location on Beverly and Rampart is untouchable. There were days when literally thousands of people stood in a line of hundreds of feet waiting to place an order at the Shack. I was there to see it happen. There wasn't room for everyone to eat. When Koulax acquired the adjacent buildings, he put a 2 x 12" Honduran mahogany plank along the outside stucco wall at 50" height where customers could stand and eat their burger. I have seen that whole area filled with people eating at practically all hours of the day and night. The shack never closes. The employees are trained to handle SPEED. The shack can serve four to five customers a minute on an average, and with the second kitchen, capacity is tripled. You do the math. 20,000 customers a day has not been too extreme.
MANY IMITATE, NONE COMPARE (from linked History page of company website)
One particular problem for Tommy’s over the years has been protecting the name. Many profit-hungry imitators have copied key elements of the operation - such as the sign and menu - in attempts to cash in on the fame of the Original. This has resulted in some customer confusion and has been the subject of many legal battles. Today, customers are instructed to, “Look for the shack,” on the Tommy’s logo.
--- Actually, they can see the slogan, "If you don't see the shack, take it back," written on all the beverage cups in current use.
While it is very commonplace in LA to sport signed photos on the wall of famous people who have frequented your store, Tommy's doesn't rely on anyone else's fame, curiously. Nor does the display of other people's fame assure the longevity of any restaurant! I have witnessed numerous restaurants and other businesses fail and close down, and one of the saddest scenes is when the worn-out proprietor removes his collection of headshots from the wall. There are some stores that change hands and leave all the photos in place for the new owners. It can be a kind of asset if the display is attractive and well maintained.
The Tommmy Koulax formula is more like, "You are an honored guest, and I am pleased to be of service to you, my loyal customer, who has come to share in the common experience of all my customers, which is the personal attention of me, Tommy, a family atmosphere of loyalty and mutual respect, good food, a place to park for free, fast service, and the memory of having been pleased this same way, every time you come to visit."
All of the 32 California Tommy's locations have only photos of Tommy Koulax and his loyal customers. But I find it a bit odd that there doesn't seem to be any photos on the Internet of the standing-room-only crowds that I have personally seen there around the Shack on Beverly in Filipinotown. There have been days when I assure you, over a thousand people are mulling about, waiting in a line that constantly inches forward, carrying their food to a picnic table or else the mahogany plank on the wall where they will stand and eat for about 5 minutes before rushing off again in this hectic and never-waiting world.
Nor do they explain in any site I've found that Tommy not only bought up the whole corner lot where the Shack is, but he also bought up the corner lot across the street (across Rampart, to the west, except for the small building on the very corner), and turned it into a split-level parking lot for his customers, where now about 150 cars can park at one time, all for free, and then walk across Rampart at the crosswalk to eat at the Shack. Very few people don't use the crosswalk, which could be a cause for a J-walking citation, but I have never heard of anyone getting such a ticket, for numerous policemen stop at Tommy's to have a quick meal-on-the-go, and they seem to turn a blind eye to any such lawbreakers, perhaps because they share the loyalty of being one of Tommy's fans.
Tommy Koulax is the star of the whole operation. And he has been deceased for over 20 years.
The following text belongs in the pink bubble to the left of the following image:
The original shack today serves as the company's logo and for good reasons. Although now there are many Original Tommy's locations throughout Southern California, none compares with the huge popularity of the Original Los Angeles location.
---Inside the Shack kitchen --- there's room for up to 5 personnel, in very tight quarters. They each know their job and stick to it, like soldiers in a submarine at war. If you ever want the experience of having your order filled in 30 seconds, while three more people behind you are placing theirs, this is the place to go.
Their specialty is the Tommy's Chili Burger, which traditionally has been what you get when you go there and order
"A Burger." 
However, thanks to what must have been lawyers and/or marketing 'experts', the cashier now asks you if you want chili, tomato, pickles, onion, mustard and Ketchup on it. Whoever came up with that idea is all about discarding the tradition that the Founder handed down to them (sound familiar?) because at Beverly and Rampart in "Historic Filipinotown" (look up 2575 W. Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles, and see what the neighborhood title is on the map), you never had to say you want chili or any of that other stuff. That's the way you got it, and if you were somehow surprised, well, you got laughed at by all the other customers "in the know."
They would make you a replacement burger, if you insisted, but the crowd would make you a laughingstock. The success of Tommy's was squarely founded on a cultural phenomenon of being part of a madding crowd of people who all want the same experience. And when you don't
'fit in' to the crowd, you are an outcast, and nobody wants to be an outcast!!
I haven't been back to the 'original shack' for some years, but things have changed at "Tommy's Number 2" and
other locations. (Trivia question: Which of the presently 35 locations is and always has been "Number Two?" -- hint: they're open 24/7/385, just like The Shack is, and has been for the past 50 years.)
There is a bit of history and lore, however, that goes back further than the start of the "Original Tommy's," which began in 1946, founded by a son of Greek immigrants, named Tommy Koulax. The historical fact that the following brief mention doesn't mention is, on their
best day Ptomaine Tommy never served as many customers as Tommy Koulax did, in the heyday of 1969, even on his WORST day.
Source:
Lincoln Heights and more!
Ptomaine Tommy's
Or
"The Original Ptomaine Tommy"
HOME OF THE ORIGINAL SIZE
2420 N. Broadway
1946 Matchbook cover
"The Original Ptomaine Tommy" Was a 24-hour L.A. chili parlor with the wonderful in-your-face name Ptomaine Tommy's.
He invented the chili size, a burger patty smothered in chili (chili burger), in the 1920s.
His real name was Tommy DeForest, and from 1913 to 1958, he was the major-domo of local burgerdom.
More than likely, DeForest, who claimed Mae West, Mary Pickford, and Dorothy Lamour as regulars, was the restaurateur who popularized the ladling of a masa-thickened, beanless chili on a burger.
Ptomaine Tommy, once proprietor of the largest and best known chili parlor in the city. Ptomaine Tommy served straight chili and a Southwestern variation, a hamburger smothered with chili. He had two ladles, a large and a small. When a customer ordered straight chili, he got out the large ladle. When he wanted the other, he usually said “Hamburger size.” So Ptomaine Tommy put up one sign that read HAMBURGER SIZE 15¢, and another that read CHILI SIZE 20¢. Other chili joints followed suit and before long chili was known throughout Los Angeles as “size”. They'd say, “Just gimme a bowl of size.”
Tommy's closed because of financial troubles, and Tommy died a week later.
To this day Los Angeles is rife with burger joints named Tom’s, Tommy's, Tummy's, Tammies, or Big Tommy's. Some may descend from Ptomaine Tommy's, while others claim a lineage that dates to a Greek immigrant named Tommy Koulax who, in a 1946 bid for differentiation, opened a burger stand that he dubbed Tommy's Original.
Topic: Chili Burger - Chili Cheese Fries thread (Read 3220 times)