Welcome to the photo series Eater Scenes, in which photographers visit some of the world's great restaurants to capture them at a certain, and very specific, point in the day. To celebrate Burger Week 2015, photographer Steve Walter visits a Connecticut icon that's been serving hamburgers for more than a century.
Who invented the hamburger as Americans know it? It depends on who you ask. But according to the fourth-generation owners of New Haven restaurant Louis' Lunch, the 120-year-old lunch counter is the birthplace of the "hamburger sandwich." As legend has it, Louis' Lunch served its first hamburger in the year 1900, when the spot was still a lunch wagon. After a diner specifically requested something to-go, owner Louis Lassen — whose portrait still hangs in the cozy space — responded by offering a sandwich featuring "ground steak trimmings" in between two slices of toast. The unconventional hamburger "bun" still reigns at Louis Lunch, and according to Kerry Lassen, whose husband Jeff is Louis's great-grandson, "most people, after having it on toast, enjoy the toast more," she says. "It makes the taste of the burger come out versus the bun."
Next read: The 21 Essential Burgers of America
Louis' Lunch's burgers are still cooked on the era-appropriate, vertically aligned cast-iron grills (which date to the late-1890s). But these days, regulars know the Lassens' in-house "shorthand" — "cheese works" is dining-room code for a cheeseburger with all the trimmings. "Jeff doesn't exactly remember how it came about, but [it was probably fueled by] the necessity of getting tired of saying things out over and and over," Kerry Lassen says. (It's a lot of calling out orders: The restaurant goes through 150-200 pounds of beef per day during the lunch rush.) Photographer Steve Walter stopped by during a recent Tuesday lunch service to capture the grills in action; watch service unfold in the gallery above.