Photo: Romulo Yanes
Working on the recent Past Perfect issue of Gourmet Live got me thinking about a 2002 article I wrote for the trade publication Restaurant Business Magazine about restaurants that have stood the test of time. For the article, we asked the proprietors of 10 ancient restaurants, “What’s the secret to staying open forever?” One of the featured restaurants was Louis’ Lunch, opened by Louis Lassen in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1895 and often credited as the “birthplace of the hamburger.”
For the article, I interviewed Louis’ grandson, Ken Lassen, who had started grinding meat for the restaurant when he was a young boy. “There are a lot of things that 85-year-old Ken Lassen doesn’t like,” I wrote. “He doesn’t like the crass language that boys use these days. ‘The knuckleheads don’t have any respect for women,’ he says. He’s even less pleased that girls are ‘getting to where they speak the same way.’ He doesn’t like it when highways tear through town obliterating everything in their paths. He doesn’t like the ‘damn’ tax increases. He doesn’t like air conditioning. He doesn’t like the fact that cows raised for food are given growth hormones and aren’t allowed to stay in the feeding pen–he says it makes the meat taste less meaty. He especially doesn’t like fast-food burgers, which he says are so tasteless they have to be drowned in ketchup to get them down–which brings us to ketchup, another thing Lassen doesn’t like one bit.”
Ken Lassen is one of the memorable (and quotable) interview subjects of my career, but what’s stuck with me the most is his disdain for factory-farmed meat. He was speaking out against practices derided by Eric Schlosser in Fast Food Nation, first published in 2002 (and who I also interviewed for Restaurant Business). But while Schlosser talked about the harm to humans and animals, Lassen was focused on flavor.
Since those two interviews, I’ve sought old-fashioned meat–grass-fed and free-range–whenever I make a burger, steak, or meatloaf.
Pictured: the Ultimate Burger (apologies to the Lassens for the ketchup).
