Photo: Courtesy of Philippe the Original
On October 6th, Philippe the Original will celebrate its 100th anniversary with bands, speeches and a rollback of prices to 1908. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of fans will show up to pay homage to the oldest continuously operating restaurant in Los Angeles. And most of them will be there for one dish: the French dip sandwich, which will only cost $0.10 that day.
In other cities – cities with a greater sense of history – 100 years is just a sliver of time. New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago and San Francisco all have restaurants that passed the century mark a long time ago. But Los Angeles is endlessly re-creating itself. And in the process, generations of restaurants have come…and gone. But Philippe Mathieu’s sandwich shop has persevered, thrived and entered the realm of legend.
It sits at the cusp of what little history has been preserved in LA. Olvera Street is on one side, Old Chinatown on the other. Across the street is Union Station. Up the hill is Dodger Stadium. And more than a few fans of the Dodgers stop at Philippe for a bite on their way to a game – it’s the perfect combination, a Philippe French dip sandwich followed by a Dodger Dog with everything on it.
The story is that the French dip sandwich was invented by accident one day, when Mathieu inadvertently dropped a sliced French roll into a roasting pan filled with meat juices. When he started to redo the sandwich, the customer – a policeman – told him not to bother; he’d take the sandwich as it was. He returned the next day with some friends, all wanting their sandwiches "French dipped."
A century later, everyone who goes to Philippe gets their sandwiched dipped. Whether filled with beef, pork, lamb, turkey or ham, it arrives soaking with juices. Some also get their sandwiches slathered with the terrifyingly hot mustard that’s a house signature. There are pickled eggs as well, along with pig’s feet and an unexpectedly good selection of wines. There’s sawdust on the floor, and long, well-worn tables that you share with strangers. Or rather you share them with your fellow Angelenos, people who you’d never meet stuck on the freeways of Los Angeles. Philippe does the wondrous – it makes us into a city. Which for Los Angeles is both something old... and something new.
– Merrill Shindler