Empire of Lies
Though I’m a grown-ass man who probably should have moved on to more mature headware, like a beret (JK, no one, except Che Guevara and mimes should ever do this), I like to wear baseball caps. As a child of the 1980s and 1990s with disposable income of an adult and the heart of a teenager, I buy far more than I’ll ever wear regularly.
Part of the problem isn’t even that I have too many hats. It’s that I like one cap so much that it’s pretty much the only one I ever wear. I have back-ups because the version I like is no longer manufactured.
Mature adulting is nothing if not a regular recognition of what you truly love followed by an acquisition phase that ensures you can have that thing forever. Steve Jobs had the mock turtleneck. I have this hat.
One day, I took my kids, while wearing my signature hat, to see some other grown ass men who have made a fortune as YouTube stars doing trick sports plays like shooting a basketball into a hoop on the ground from a top of a skyscraper, aka the gents from Dude Perfect. They were touring with a stop at Allstate Arena in Rosemont (a good excuse for me to stop for Chili’s fajitas).
I pushed my way through the crowd holding both my sons’ hands. As I was moving toward my arena seating section, I heard a guy say, “I like your hat.”
I looked up. It was like staring into the face of God. I couldn’t process it.
I couldn’t even utter a thank you. I just followed that man who had his own kid in tow with my disbelieving eyes as he ducked in to a backstage “VIP” area.
My son saw what I saw and said, “Dad, was that…?”
I said, “I think it was.”
But it couldn’t have been. Because the context made no sense. This person doesn’t live in Chicago. They could probably have Dude Perfect perform a show at their house if they wanted. There’s no way he was slumming out here with the rest of us.
And yet, my son, unprompted by me, believed he saw what I saw.
You probably want to know what hat I was wearing?
A black 99 Classic Dri-FIT Aerobill Nike Tiger Woods logo hat.
That’s right, Eldrick Tont Woods, as his mother knows him, apparently was at Allstate Arena with his son Charlie and took a second to tell ME that he liked his own hat.
I tell this story a lot. But I’m not sure it’s true. My only rationalization, which is pretty flimsy, is maybe Tiger was designing a local course and used the opportunity to take his son on a trip. Would Tiger actually risk walking in the public way of a stadium concourse when he probably celebrity back doors almost everything?
Still, I share this story like its absolute fact. This story might even be told by my son to his kids someday. I can’t find the article, but I remember hearing something, likely from a Malcolm Gladwell podcast, that like 90% of all family lore passed down through generations is not true. Sorry, but your great great grandfather was probably not a prohibition-era rum runner who once dined with Al Capone at every historic restaurant still operating in Chicago today.
The story and the way it’s told trumps veracity every time. This means we spend a lot of our lives believing things as fact which aren’t real.
Many of the following things are known at this point, but also generally still accepted as truth, despite having long ago been debunked:
Thomas Edison did not invent the light bulb. It was probably Alessandro Volta or Humphrey Davy
Henry Ford did not invent the automobile. It was probably a guy named Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot and if not him, maybe even Leonardo da Vinci.
This is a food newsletter, though, so let’s get to why we really came here:
McDonald’s did not invent the Big Mac.
I know, you’re like of course not Mike, the hamburger was around forever. No doubt, but the idea of a double decker burger with a third bun with special sauce with shredded lettuce on a sesame seed bun is pretty damn specific and well differentiated from a basic burger.
Ok, sure, but Mike, there are Big Mac clones everywhere. Also true, but generally they’re called The Imitator or The Big Mick (McDowell’s for lyfe). They acknowledge their parentage.
Except they’re not really paying homage to their true origin, because the golden arches stole the Big Mac!
If you were making Coming to America today…well, they actually did. It’s called Coming 2 America which by the way I’d hoped to illustrate my point further with the fact that a seventies porn VHS obviously had this name first. I can’t actually verify this, so either the porn IMDB data is incomplete or the whole industry missed one of the most obvious title parodies of all time.
Anyways, if you wanted to honor the real history of this sandwich you’d call it like The Big Boi (Outkast might have some words tho) or the Big Child. Ironically, Chicago’s Big Baby would be a nice nod, but it does not have a third bun and it has griddled onions. This is because the Big Mac was basically a rip off of the Big Boy hamburger from the Big Boy restaurant chain.
If you grew up on the West Coast, you’d know this chain as Bob’s Big Boy. If you’re from Michigan like me, you know them as Elias Brothers Big Boy. If you grew up on the east coast, you know the chain as Frisch’s. If you’re from the South, it was Shoney’s Big Boy. No joke, there was a McDowell’s Big Boy in North Dakota, but it did not call its signature sandwich the Big Mick. There were 34 different franchise modifiers for Big Boys at one point.
This is not surprising as the Big Boy restaurant chain history is basically littered with a series of comedic business decisions that explain why the Big Mac reigns supreme and not the OG Big Boy.
Bob’s Pantry became Bob’s Big Boy precisely because of the popularity of his burger invented by its owner Bob Wian in 1937. Though things were going gangbusters, people were already ripping Wian off with rogue Big Boys. Wian could not protect his trademark without having restaurant locations in multiple states, so he sold his first franchise to Dave Frisch for $1 a year.
Wian’s other mistake is that he let Frisch pretty much do whatever he wanted which included putting “tartar sauce” on the Big Boy and jettisoning the familiar overall-clad mascot for some skippy little carhop looking dude.
Only one of these statues became so iconic that it made an appearance in Austin Powers.
There was no universal and committed brand identity nationwide, except that all Big Boy restaurants had to serve the double decker Big Boy burger. One of those restaurants was Big Boy Eat’n Park in Pittsburgh, a frequent haunt of Jim Delligatti, one of Ray Kroc’s early McDonald’s franchisees.
Delligatti said he “thought up” the concept for the Big Mac in 1965 in the kitchen of the Ross Township McDonald’s location on Knight Road in Pennsylvania. Delligatti served the Mac at a few of his stores under different names, eventually called it the Big Mac in 1967 at his Uniontown location where it took off. By 1968 McDonald’s put it on every menu in America. By 1969, it accounted for 19% of total sales. In 2016, McDonald’s sold 550 million Big Macs globally.
In 1993, when a reporter prodded Delligatti, he made Thomas Edison proud and said, “This wasn’t like me discovering the lightbulb. The bulb was already there. All I did was screw it in the socket.”
I don’t know if this is accurate. If I had a light out and found I’d run out of lightbulbs, and so drunkenly snuck into my neighbor’s yard, unscrewed a bulb from their house and reset it in my own fixture at home, it would be a transgression for sure, but if my neighbors discovered my idiocy, we could probably get over it.
In launching the Big Mac, it was more like Delligatti’s neighbor was General Electric and he stole their entire inventory plus the spec engineering diagrams and copyright for a certain kind of lightbulb. It was like Donald Trump declaring he invented the US Presidency.
You can’t copyright food ideas or recipes outside of trademarked names, so Delligatti got away with it. He also opened a museum celebrating his tasty thievery in 2007.
McDonald’s or Delligatti might argue that their special sauce is slightly different which is true, as Wian’s original recipe was sweet pickle relish, ketchup and chili sauce, whereas McDonald’s is mayo, mustard, pickle relish, paprika, vinegar and some spices including onion powder, granulated garlic, and white pepper.
But, what is the innovation of Big Mac? Mushy onion slivers?
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The original 1967 Big Mac commercial makes no mention of onions at all, so who knows when the reconstituted allium push really began?
Floppy-ass pickles?
Nope, ultimately just smarter business sense, more marketing dollars, and a sociopathic corporate commitment to credit claiming.
You can’t get mad at Delligati I guess. If we scrutinize Wian for his creation of the Big Boy, he ripped off the club sandwich with his toasted middle bun intermezzo (from the Union Club in New York) and got the idea of using pickle relish from the tavern he worked at before starting his own restaurant.
And yet, I, being an OG myself, tend to side with the OGs. I am so obsessed with the few remaining vintage Big Boy restaurants, I Apple-mapped my way to one recently during a road trip to Canada. I also bought a bobblehead of the Big Boy mascot. A life goal is to own one of the actual restaurant statues someday.
This is partly because McDonald’s trips gave me stolen minutes with carbs and friends, while Big Boy, which was a true sit-down diner, gave me a lifetime of slow moments with family. You broke bread at Big Boys. You just housed it at McDonald’s
While I revere the Big Boy mascot, I generally fear the pedophile-looking killer clown and his amorphous grape jello blob homie, aka Ronald and Grimace. Thinking of Delligatti and Mcdonald’s big heist, the Hamburglar does have a new resonance.
Ultimately, I’m team Big Boy. I’ll take a hot fudge brownie infused with strawberry ice cream during the annual Big Boy Strawberry Fest – which in the ranks of fake restaurant created holidays comes in above McRib season- over a McD hot fudge sundae. Good luck finding a working McDonald’s ice cream machine anyway.
Though Delligatti probably made a lot of money operating his franchises I do appreciate that he apparently never received royalties from the corporate parent for the wealth his “idea” generated for Ray Kroc and shareholders. Delligati did receive a “plaque” from McDonald’s for his trillion-dollar creative pilfering. I’m sure Bob Wian is smiling about this comeuppance somewhere.
Elias Bros Big Boy was the best food in my young life! And their location had rollerblading servers. IMHO, 100% better than any Big Mac, hahaha...