Famous Nathan (16 page)

“We had big glass coolers for the grape, orange, and pineapple drinks; we used to have to put big ice pieces in them all the time. I'd have to run inside the kitchen, [chip off] ice pieces, and bring them out to the coolers. It was very hard. When I see a customer I didn't like, like she's in a white dress or something, saying, ‘Gimme a drink, gimme a drink, gimme a drink!' I'd dump the ice pieces into the grape drink cooler.”

The resulting splash would inevitably drench the troublemaker.

Oops.

“Oh, excuse me!” Dreitzer would say, the soul of innocence.

There were variations on the prank, whereby a drink would be served with a certain amount of enthusiasm, slamming it down on the counter so it would splash onto the target. Dreitzer always sardonically fake-apologized. “Oh, I'm sorry,” he'd say.

Dreitzer was known to swat customers, other employees, anyone who angered him with a hot spatula. “Or he'd jab you with a fork,” recalled Jay Cohen. “He was a terrible man.” For decades, the store served food on ceramic plates, and another Dreitzer trick was to put mustard on the bottom of the plate so customers would get an unpleasant surprise with dinner.

The show would not end there. Whenever angry customers would demand to see the manager, Dreitzer would refer them to another longtime Nathan's worker, Ruben Epstein. The exchange would often go something like this:

Angry customer (pointing at Dreitzer): “I want that man fired!”

Epstein to Dreitzer: “Okay, so you don't come out here no more.”

It was all a joke. Dreitzer might remove himself from the front area for a few minutes to assuage the customer. Of course, the subterfuge worked in the other direction, too. Whenever Epstein's customers demanded to see the manager, he would always refer them to Dreitzer, who'd put them off in the same way.

Management refused to put a stop to the shenanigans, because Dreitzer, Epstein, and others were such valuable workers. “It wasn't a matter of being a good employee and being nice to the customers,” Cohen said. “It was a matter of how fast you could serve them and how fast you could take the money in.”

Nathan had a peculiar, half-paternal, half-adversarial relationship with such long-term employees as Dreitzer, who told a story that he thought summed up his dealings with his boss. One week, he caught his thumb as the cash register drawer banged shut, turning his thumbnail black and blue. A few days later, he made the exact same mistake.

“So I yelled,” Dreitzer recalled. “I says, ‘Goddamn it, the second time in the same damn place.'”

Nathan was nearby, as he always seemed to be. “Come in the office,” he directed his counterman, who was at the moment writhing in pain. “Come inside.”

Dreitzer tried to object. “I gotta go out. You know, it's busy. Nobody else can handle it out there.”

Nathan persisted. He took Dreitzer into the office and made him put his throbbing thumb in a glass of ice water. “Sit down and stay there.”

As Dreitzer soaked, Nathan brought up the real reason he had taken the counterman off the line. “What do you mean, you're sick and tired of this goddamn place?”

Dreitzer was confused. “Who said that? I didn't say that. What, are you deaf? You heard what I said? I said, ‘Second time in the same damn place'—second time on the same finger.”

Nathan nodded, satisfied. “Oh, I thought you said you're sick and tired of this goddamn place.” He would not stand to hear his beloved store bad-mouthed.

“He insisted that I take care of my finger before I went out,” Dreitzer recalled. “In other words, he did try to take care of us when some emergency arose.”

Nathan often took the core workers out after their grueling twelve-hour shifts. They might go bowling and then hit the S&H diner for breakfast.

“There was eight of us working,” Dreitzer said of the morning routine. “When we finished [the shift] at four o'clock in the morning, we'd take the floorboards out and wash them in the alley. We put the shutters up. Almost every morning, Nathan used to bring us to a restaurant on Stillwell Avenue: Gerry Monetti, Sammy and Patsy Augustine, Ruben Epstein, and Mike Barkel. We'd bet who could eat the most. Whatever we ate, Nathan paid for. It's what he did.”

Dreitzer remembers his boss not blinking an eye when he ordered and consumed eight double hamburgers.

An early hire rivaling Dreitzer for endurance and length of service was a cook named Sinta Low, who served as the store's kitchen manager. An immigrant from Taiwan, he resembled Nathan in his diligent, uncomplaining work ethic. His name was always collapsed simply into Sinta around the store, but his realm was the kitchen, and he rarely ventured out front. His dream, never realized, was to become a New York City policeman.

“He ran that kitchen like a czar,” said Charles Schneck, the personnel manager of Nathan's Famous. “He even chased executives out of the kitchen. As long as he was there, the kitchen ran like clockwork.”

Short and compact like his boss, Sinta possessed deceptive strength. One of the most difficult feats around the store was to manage the huge, ice-filled drink tubs, weighing easily a hundred pounds when full. They needed to be set in place so the countermen could serve the various flavored drinks.

These were the same glass tanks that Dreitzer used to splash customers, and the hulking counterman was the obvious man for the job of lifting them. “I'll put it on the dolly, and we'll move it over,” he said, squaring off with one of the tubs one day.

Dreitzer tried to heft the tank, but failed to budge it. Sinta happened to be nearby, on one of his rare forays out of the kitchen.

“One minute,” the cook said to Dreitzer. He walked over and lifted the tub into place with a single movement, “like it was nothing,” according to one bystander. Other onlookers burst out laughing, so odd was the incongruity of the short-statured cook out-lifting the heavyweight counterman.

Sinta often brought groups of store employees into Manhattan's Chinatown, early in the morning after long days at work. Their favorite place was always a Shanghai restaurant at 32 Mott Street, where the teacups could be filled with either whiskey or tea, depending on the wishes of the customer. Sinta knew the cooks there, who would serve him and his friends huge predawn meals.

Another stalwart employee, Ruben “Eppy” Epstein, was, in the words of a coworker, “like a machine with one speed. He didn't work fast. He didn't work slow. He worked steady.” For years, Eppy was the stalwart at the store's hamburger station. It was probably Epstein who most indulged in the Nathan's Famous tradition of vocalizing while at work. He would stand at his station and call out phrases in his heavy Yiddish accent, coming off like a cross between a cantor and a carnival barker.

“I have hamburgers, hamburgers!
Gildena vera
! A pound of meat and a bushel of onions, I have hamburgers, the best, the best!” The Yiddish phrase meant “golden goods,” or, in context, “tasty items.”

“All night long, he'd be going like that,” said coworker Hy Brown. “Everybody was laughing, but the hamburgers were going out like lightning.”

“Oh, we used to sing,” recalled Jack Dreitzer. “They used to hear us up on Stillwell Avenue, on the platform of the train station. They knew we were there before they came down from the platform. We used to have different chants. ‘With a pickle in the middle and an onion on the top. All hot. All hot.' You had to sing or say something to try and call the people, hustle them up.”

The burger station employed a fiendish strategy to entice customers. The countermen cooked chopped onions, sautéing them in the juices drained off from the hamburger grill. The smell would drift across the street and into the subway terminal. When potential customers got off at the station, they were like Pavlov's dogs, already salivating at the aroma of onions au jus cooking at Nathan's.

Hamburgers were all well and good, but it was at the store's frankfurter griddle where the real action went down. Cooking and serving the dogs represented a complicated kind of choreographed ballet. The sixteen-foot-long griddle was fabricated out of three-quarter-inch steel specifically for Nathan's Famous. The store used regular carbon steel, not stainless, which was becoming the norm in other commercial kitchens. The cooking surface was more difficult to keep clean, but the trade-off was a more easily controlled heat.

In the early days, the dogs came in from Hygrade in wooden casks, six hundred per barrel. The movement of the franks across the griddles was as tightly managed as any quiche in the oven of a French chef.

The hot dogs came in from the supplier linked together. “Each end of each frankfurter was tied off,” recalled former manager Hy Brown. “So we got them in big strings, and we had men that did nothing all day but separating the frankfurters.”

Cutting apart the long ropes of hot dogs was long an entry-level job at the store. The sausages went through several steps as they headed for the griddle. After they were cut from the linked strings, the individual franks were transferred to a box that held precisely six hundred hot dogs. From the box, the dogs were placed on wooden paddle boards, each with twenty-six frankfurters (no more, no less) lined up on them. Such exact counts were at the heart of Nathan's inventory control.

The paddles were carried to the grill in metal boxes. The sausages, which had been smoke-cured at the factory but were as of yet unheated, were slid off the boards directly onto the griddle, at the back of long ranks of more fully cooked dogs. The griddle could fit sixteen franks in a line. Each counterman working the griddle moved his line of frankfurters forward and turned them, so by the time they got to the front, they would be ready to serve.

The ranks of wieners advanced in columns. The counterman could check the status of a particular frankfurter by sight. When they were done, the casing might split once. Two or three ruptures of the outer skin meant the sausage was well done, ready to be served up to customers who requested theirs that way.

Cooking times were adjusted to suit the demand. The griddle had several gas burners positioned beneath it. If business was lax, the ranks of frankfurters naturally moved forward more slowly. The slow movement meant franks spent more time on the griddle, so the heat had to be turned down. During those periods, the griddle might have every other burner turned on.

At busy times, on the other hand, the frankfurters progressed across the griddle quickly. Every burner blasted at full force. If demand peaked beyond busy to frantic, the franks were preheated in the kitchen. They came out on their paddles already partially cooked. Their double-time march across the sizzling hot griddle was accomplished in minutes flat.

When the frankfurter griddle operated at top efficiency, it had eight people working on it. There were three sellers, or countermen, who interacted with the public, served the hot dogs and made change. The fastest worker earned the prime post, at the corner of the store next to the alley. There were other sellers spaced across each section of griddle and, to oversee it all, a cook.

“The cook used to take the franks, pile the grill, and turn them over,” remembered manager Hy Brown. “He would know how the frankfurters came out, medium or well done.”

The whole ballet depended on the number of customers. More demand, a hotter grill. Sparser crowds, a cooler one.

“Put up the fire,” came the call. “Shut the fire! Up the fire! Down the fire!”

One oddity of Nathan's practice at the store was that while he would often taste-test the grilled franks—and even bite into the unheated ones, straight off the delivery truck—he usually preferred to eat them boiled. He would skin the casing off and consume them without the bun, but with mustard. For the whole of his adult life, while he was at the store, Nathan ate at least two franks a day, sometimes more.

While the griddles in the front of the store were devoted to the frankfurters and hamburgers, the four six-foot grills back in the kitchen were primarily used to toast rolls. It was a point of pride to Nathan that no hot dog or hamburger was ever served on a roll that wasn't toasted. Serving anything at all on an untoasted roll represented a cardinal sin, earning the miscreant a tongue-lashing at best and a pink slip at worst.

Field's bakery originally supplied the buns, baked in a steamy oven, so that the texture turned out a little chewy. Later on, Nathan alternated between Field's and Sabrett. He would play the companies off each other in order to get the best price and the best quality. The classic Nathan's hot dog was a water-baked Field's roll with a Hygrade frankfurter with mustard. That's the combination for which the store was best known.

At times, it seemed that Nathan enlarged his conception of family to include not only blood relatives, not only loyal workers, but his customer base, as well. Nathan and his workers often got to know customers by name. He had a natural affection for those hungry hordes who were pushing their nickels, dimes, and quarters across his counters. They were, after all, the people who were making his fortune.

Nathan blew up one time when he realized employees were eating into the store's limited inventory of Drake's raisin cakes. He knew that certain customers preferred them, and he ordered thirty or forty for a week's supply. He didn't make a great deal of profit over such a paltry sale. He was simply interested in taking care of his loyal raisin cake clientele.

In 1933, on the first day that legal alcohol sales could resume with the repeal of the Volstead Act, Nathan threw something of a party for his customers. He obtained one of the first post-Prohibition permits to sell beer. He made a deal with Kings Brewery, the major local supplier, just cranking up legal production again on Pulaski Street in Brooklyn. As a promotion marking the fact that Nathan's Famous would now be offering beer, Nathan took over Anna Singer's custard stand across Schweikerts Walk and gave out free mugs of beer.