Two classics!
Posted on 02/27/2007 12:32:29 PM PST by Alex Murphy
In 1962, Lou Groen was desperate to save his floundering hamburger restaurant, the first McDonald’s in the Cincinnati, Ohio, area.
His problem: The clientele was heavily Catholic. Back then, most Catholics abstained from meat every Friday, not just during Lent, a 40-day period of repentance that began last week with Ash Wednesday.
His solution: He created a sandwich that would eventually be consumed at a rate of 300 million a year — the McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish.
“Frisch’s (the local Big Boy chain) dominated the market, and they had a very good fish sandwich,” recalled Groen, now 89. “I was struggling. The crew was my wife, myself, and a man named George. I did repairs, swept floors, you name it.
“But that area was 87 percent Catholic. On Fridays we only took in about $75 a day,“ said Groen, a Catholic himself. “All our customers were going to Frisch’s.
“So I invented my fish sandwich, developed a special batter, made the tartar sauce and took it to headquarters.”
That led to a wager between Groen and McDonald’s chief Ray Kroc, who was preparing his own meatless alternative.
“He called his sandwich the Hula Burger,” Groen said. “It was a cold bun and a slice of pineapple and that was it.
“Ray said to me, ‘Well, Lou, I’m going to put your fish sandwich on (a menu) for a Friday. But I’m going to put my special sandwich on, too. Whichever sells the most, that’s the one we’ll go with.’
“Friday came and the word came out. I won hands down. I sold 350 fish sandwiches that day. Ray never did tell me how his sandwich did.”
But the chain compelled Groen to modify the fish recipe.
“I wanted halibut originally,” Groen said. “I was paying $2 a pound for halibut. That sandwich cost me 30 cents apiece to make. They told me it had to sell for 25 cents. I had to fall back on Atlantic cod, a whitefish, and I added a slice of cheese. But my halibut sandwich far outshines that one.”
Groen wasn’t complaining.
“My fish sandwich was the first addition ever to McDonald’s original menu,” he said. “It saved my franchise.”
And fed it. By the time he sold his franchise in 1986, Groen owned 43 McDonald’s restaurants in Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky, about half the number the region contains today. But his prosperity didn’t include a slice of the Filet-O-Fish’s national sales.
“Not a penny,” he said. “I made my money by selling the product and being the best operator I could.”
Charles Faulks, operations director for McDonald’s Ohio Region, called Groen’s contributions legendary.
“Lou exemplified Ray Kroc’s philosophy that you can succeed if you believe in your brand, treat your people right and give back to your community,” Faulks said.
Most annoying sandwich on the menu, takes forever to fry and the stupid bun steamer always breaks, plus standard equipment for a midsize store is the fish fryer is only big enough for two racks and you can't cook them in any of the other vats because the fish taste leaches out and nobody wants fish flavored pies (back before the baked pie came to be). I remember one rainy Friday during Lent (three conditions that always increased sales of the FoF), ugh we just couldn't keep up. Then there was my idiot co-worker that needed to be reminded how to assemble the things every single day. I think there are no pleasant memories associated with the Fillet-o-Fish from my McHell years.
I hear you!
Veteran of McD's from the paper-hat and barber shirt days.
i know it's abtaining from any flesh of vertebrates or things that come from vertebrates... WHY? i'm not so clear...
Dairy isn't flesh though, it's milk. I've never heard of abstaining from dairy products or eggs.
Although, I think the thing that has always disgusted me the most is the people who will eat extravagent shrimp and lobster dinners on Fridays during Lent.
Bishops can grant a dispensation waiving the no-meat rule on St. Patrick's Day. In those instances, the faithful are expected to make a compensatory sacrifice.
I was in the transition "class" started with the paper hats and those awful shirts that couldn't breath if you put them in front of a fan and the damn clip-ons. Finished in the ballcap and rugby shirt.
How many years until you stopped having the timer nightmare? It was about 4 for me.
When arriving at my first flying assignment after flight school and SAC training, I saw a McDonald's sign on the street as one drove from the base toward town. It proudly proclaimed:'' Millions sold.'' I puled my new 1955 Chevy over and tried one.
yeah but fish and eggs come from vertebrates.
i know its vertebrates because vertebrates were made on a different day from invertebrates...
I had always been taught that fish and seafood were excluded, perhaps the Orthodox differ on this. Although, I believe crustaceans (lobster, shrimp, crab) are considered scavengers and prohibited under strict kosher law, so I don't know how (if at all) that may have figured into tradition.
Oh and eggs and other dairy products DO NOT COME FROM FLESH, the animal is not slaughtered for them and I am quite certain that this distinction is important.
My McD bad day was pulling the shakes off the mixer (they were still mixed in my day) early and putting a horizontal pink stripe across the distric supervisor's shirt.
I was sentanced to the lobby for 5 months.
When I was there the fries were still cooked in beef tallow, man were they good!
it was not always taught that fish were excluded, if you read back it started as vertebrates and was generalized to seafood...
I'll have to go back and study it.
The old restrictions for fasting in the universal Church were:
No meat
No dairy
No animal oils
No fish
No wine
No eggs
No alcohol
No food before sundown
This was done every Wednesday and Friday (or Friday and Saturday in Rome and Italy), all of Lent, Vigils, and Advent. The West also fasted on Ember days and Rogation dats, while the East added shorter multi-week fasts before the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul and the Assumption
Obviously this was a very harsh regimen, and few could follow it, so the Church relented in stages.
In the East, they tended to keep more restrictions on types of food, but allow a greater quantity to be consumed. In the West, the types of food disallowed were lessened, but one was still expected to take no food until 3 pm, then later noon time, and then only one meal per day and one small snack.
The differentiation of fasting and abstinence is a very recent and modern invention. It used to be that whenever you fasted, you also abstained, and whenver you abstained, you also fasted.
I understand that in some areas of the world, where the consumption of fish is extremely common, the abstinence expected during fasting is from fish and seafood, while flesh meat is allowed.
It has always seemed incongruous to me for Catholics to be feasting on fried fish or lobster and shrimp during a supposed day of penance. I'd much rather see a vegetarian meal of vegetables, fruits and grains or potatoes, or a dish like cheese pizza or a meatless pasta being served.
Why do you think Easter Eggs are such a symbol of the feast? or Shrove Tuesday pancake dinners so widespread? No eggs or butter or milk for the duration of Lent, so it all had to be used up before Ash Wednesday (hence, pnacakes), and couldn't be had again to enjoy until Easter (heance Easter Eggs and buttery sweet Hot Cross Buns)!
We can eat any type of "fish" or shellfish without a backbone. That means clams, oysters, mussels, squid, octopus,shrimp, cuttlefish etc. What the old timers taught was that one had to abstain from anything which had blood in it or came from something with blood in it. Because they didn't see any red blood in invertebrate sea food, it was OK. Most fast days in Great Lent we also abstain from wine and olive oil.
The only variation on the fasting rules that I am aware of is with the Cypriots who say that chicken isn't "meat". Honestly, they do. Go figure.
MT, go easy the first year; work into the fast. Your experience about the meat being easy and the dairy/eggs hard is right on the money. That's pretty much what we all find and think how hard it is to find things to eat which don't have either milk or dairy products or eggs of some sort in them.
We had a softserve machine with a notoriously phinicky gasket, man what a mess that thing made... about twice a week until the new gasket finally got delivered.
The fries tasted so much better when the grease had some beef fat in it.
It's funny now to walk into a McDs and see how little of the equipment I recognize, and all the new stuff on the menu. Actually the new menu items are nice, I pretty only order stuff I never cooked.
What tricks did you pull on bad customers? My favorite was not breaking the yolks on egg mcmuffins so they'd squirt all over your tie. Did they make "blow burgers" at your store?
We had an annoying vegetarian customer that found out about the grease so he'd request his fries cooked in a different vat, frequently I did it in the fish vat. There was another one that always ordered his burgers without pickles and he'd get upity if he thought we'd taken a regular burger and removed the pickles (which was frequent, also very detectable on a cheeseburger), I'd pour some pickle juice on his bun. Dribbling the ketchup around the outside of the bun rather than globbing it in the middle had the same effect as not busting the yoke in a mcmuffin. What was a blow burger?
Two classics!
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