By Gregory Crofton
“He had the genius, the intelligence, the schmaltz, whatever you want to to call it, he had it.”
For Nathan Handwerker, the founder of Nathan’s Famous hotdogs in Coney Island, working long hours to help put food on the table was the norm.
Constant work started at the age of 11. Nathan came from a family of 13 children. His father, a Polish shoemaker, couldn’t make ends meet. In an effort to help out, young Handwerker got a job at a bakery. For the next two years, he slept on a cot in their kitchen waking at midnight to start mixing the dough.
He would work straight through till the next morning. When the bread was ready, it was his job to walk the streets and sell the loaves too. Handwerker saved his money until one day he quit and went to a butcher where he bought as much meat for his family as he could afford.
These experiences formed Nathan’s Famous work ethic. With it he built a hot dog empire. By 1916, at the age of 24, he had emigrated to the United States and opened his own restaurant on Coney Island. It offered dogs for 5 cents, homemade lemonade, fresh seafood and even barbecue. He was loyal to his workers and paid them well, but he was a demanding boss.
Within a few years, his stop-and-go corner store, a stone’s throw from Manhattan, would sell 75,000 hotdogs on a Saturday, all of them high-quality beef and made on site.
“Nathan’s Famous” is a wonderful, warm and nostalgic doc produced and directed by Nathan’s grandson, Lloyd Handwerker. I watched it on NBC’s streaming platform, Peacock.
It is a tightly packed 86 minutes filled like a delicious frankfurter with archival footage, home movies, family photos and interviews only a grandson could get. Don’t miss this one.