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Lums Restaurants
LUMS was a family restaurant chain in the United States. LUMS was founded in 1956 by Stuart and Clifford S. Perlman when they purchased Lum’s hot dog stand in Miami Beach for $10,000. Over the next few years, the Perlman brothers opened three additional Lum’s restaurants, for a total of four by 1961. Clifford Perlman, who in addition to owning Lum’s, had been serving as the president of Southern Wood Industries, Inc., resigned that position to work full time for Lum’s. Under the brothers, Lum’s began aggressively expanding and franchising. In 1969, Lum’s, Inc. was admitted to the New York Stock Exchange. In 1969, Lum’s, Inc. purchased Caesars Palace, then a 500 room hotel casino on the famous Las Vegas Strip, for $60 million.
The food operations of Lum’s, Inc. were sold in 1971 to John Y. Brown, then Chairman of Kentucky Fried Chicken and a group of investors. At the time of sale, the company owned and franchised 400 stores in the U.S., Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Europe.
In 1978, Wienerwald Holdings A.G., a Swiss holding company and parent of the Wienerwald restaurant chain, under the direction of Friedrich Jahn, purchased the 273 restaurant chain from Brown. However, Wienerwald had overextended itself and was forced to file for bankruptcy in 1982. The original Lum’s location closed in 1983. The last remaining LUMS location, in Davie, Florida, closed on June 28, 2009. For a time, the company’s commercial spokesman was Milton Berle.
Food Magazine September 8, 2008
RE: Ollieburger Sauce
O.K. here it is, I have found a gentleman that was the Director of Operations of several Lums restaurants in New England. He sells the “original” Ollie’s spice mixture for $10.95 per pound plus shipping. I am a native of Miami and spent many an afternoon at Ollie’s original steak house on Miami Beach. This is the real deal! As far as a bun sauce, there was NEVER any sauce on the original Ollie burger, in fact you were likely to get yelled at or something thrown at you if you tried to put ANYTHING on a burger that Ollie made. This is the same spice mixture that he used on his fries and in his thousand island dressing as well as on his awesome green beans. For a true Ollie burger, add 1 tsp of this spice mixture to each 1/3 lb. Burger meat. Let sit for 30 minutes and grill. I promise you that any of you old Miami Beach High School students will think your back at Ollie’s place. The only thing that will be missing is Ollie yelling at Terrie.
Wienerwald Restaurants March 1, 2006
Austrian-born Friedrich Jahn is Europe’s answer to Howard Johnson, or maybe Colonel Sanders. Through his chicken-lickin’ Wienerwald restaurants, which have spread across Europe and into the U.S., he works to satisfy a hungry middle class. The chain grossed $115 million last year and should do at least 10% better this year. Last month Jahn opened new outposts in Vienna and Nuremberg; he plans others in Scandinavia, Britain and South Africa. “I wouldn’t be surprised,” he says, “if one day there is a Wienerwald in Nigeria or Kenya.”
In 1955, with $3,000 in savings, Jahn leased a run-down Munich tavern, dressed it up with Vienna woods decor and a resoundingly fowl menu. He figured that hearty-eating Germans—who considered barbecued chicken quite a delicacy and were willing to pay $3 to $4 for a whole one at a festival like Munich’s frothy Oktoberfest—would buy it every day if it were cheaper. To keep his own costs down, Jahn bicycled to the Munich poultry market every morning, haggled for bargains, pedaled back to the restaurant with a load of chicken. His specialty: half a roast chicken for 85¢. The first Wienerwald restaurant was an overnight hit, and Jahn began expanding.
With his chain growing at the rate of three new restaurants a month, Jahn has built three small factories to produce “Viennese interiors” and another to manufacture automatic spits. He also started a six-story chick hatchery in Bavaria. (But he still buys most of his birds from the U.S., which supplies Germany with $30 million worth of frozen chicken a year.) Jahn has opened Wienerwald restaurants in Belgium, Austria and The Netherlands, will soon branch into Switzerland.
Part of Jahn’s rise to eminence as Europe’s biggest chain restaurateur is the result of using American methods of mass purchasing and strict cost controls. Another ingredient is a deft instinct for customers’ inner needs. His restaurants are gemütlich, the food is solid, and the prices are 10% to 20% lower than almost anywhere else—precisely what he would want for himself, despite his success. A chief deputy, Rolf Schielein, says of Jahn: “Basically, he has retained his waiter’s mind.”
Idea from Oktoberfest. “My grandfather in Austria was an innkeeper, and so was my father,” Jahn says. By the time Friedrich was five, he was serving pretzels in the family tavern in Linz. After World War II, he became headwaiter in Munich’s Intermezzo, a strip joint that for some reason also served food. In 1955, he invested his savings of $3,000 to acquire a nearby winehouse. Refurbishing and a hearty, inexpensive menu kept the eatery full. Jahn’s real breakthrough came after a slightly tipsy customer suggested that he feature the kind of roast chicken sold during Munich’s Oktoberfest. To cook the birds, Jahn invented a special rotating spit and sold half a chicken for only 65¢.
When Jahn opened his second restaurant in Stuttgart, he wanted a suitable name, redolent of Austria. From Johann Strauss’s Tales from the Vienna Woods, inspiration struck. Jahn traveled to the U.S. “to learn the system”—and then added a thick Germanic accent.
The restaurants have standardized décor, which, despite the chain’s name, is ersatz Tyrolean rather than Viennese. Each unit combines such decorations as gingham curtains, fake wooden beams, simulated carriage lamps, leatherette settees and plastic flowers. The menu has remained basically fowl, emphasizing chicken in several forms, with a few excursions into wurst and schnitzel. The birds are heavily laced with salt and paprika, which tends to give customers a powerful thirst. Jahn’s cash registers thus tinkle along with sales of wine and beer.
On to America. Jahn has now opened nine restaurants in New York City. He talks of soon buying and redecorating a chain of 350 restaurants across the U.S. Another new venture is a string of four hotels in Europe.
Now 48, Jahn rules the roost as chairman, president and sole stockholder of his Zurich-based Wienerwald Share Corp. Estimates of his fortune start at $70 million. He is completely debt free. “I’ve always operated with my own means, independent of banks,” he says. Jahn travels constantly, spending six days a month in the U.S. For short trips he favors one of his five chauffeur-driven Mercedes-Benz 300s. For longer hops he uses one of his three aircraft. Once aloft, the millionaire ex-headwaiter, often in shirtsleeves and with blue eyes gleaming, serves sandwiches and coffee to his executives.
My aim,” says roly-poly Friedrich Jahn, 39, “is to become the European Howard Johnson.” He is well on the way. Only seven years ago, Austrian-born Jahn was a waiter in a Munich striptease nightclub. Today he runs a money-clinking chain of 111 “Wienerwald” restaurants that serve up spit-roasted chicken, Viennese wine, and recorded zither music to 100,000 customers a day in 58 German cities. Partly because of Jahn’s promotional abilities, German consumption of chicken has increased nearly fourfold since 1955 (to last year’s average 13 Ibs. per person), and West Germany has become the world’s largest importer of poultry.[2
I met Mr Jahn in Burlington, Vt when he visited our Lums franchise. He was a very interesting man, always talking about his restaurants and telling us how to improve our sales of Wienerwald chicken. We had seven Lums restaurants at the time and we were using a lot of chickens. One problem we ran into was when we were out we we out! The chickens had to be prepped and seasoned one day ahead of time and took about one hour to cook on the rotisserie. Another problem was we served half of a 2 1/2 lb chicken and at the end of thr night if you cooked to many, they had to be prepped into chicken salad at Lums because we didn’t have the knowledgeable personal to make other chicken items with the left over wienerwald chicken. The Wienerwald chicken were a main item especially for dinner at our restaurants. It became a signature item with the Ollieburger.
The Taste Bud: Long live the Ollieburger August 25, 2004
This is an article from a Louisville, KY newspaper:
The Ollieburger is the stuff of legend: Thick, juicy, spicy and unique, it is available from only one place in Louisville these days, and a handful of places on the planet. That said, I learned that eating more than one of these delectable mouth-gasms in a single day might not be a great idea.
Let me start from the beginning.
I hadn’t had an Ollieburger in years. Then recently, my friend Amy talked me into meeting her for lunch at Ollie’s Trolley, located downtown at Third Street and Kentucky. The tiny trolley-shaped shack is the last of its kind in Louisville, and the burgers — topped with a slice of mozzarella cheese, inside a bun slathered with a Thousand Island-based sauce — are as delicious as they were in the 1970s. The French fries, which are shaken in Ollie’s spice mix, are just as good.
The late Ollie Gleichenhaus was a legendary grouch who was particular about his burgers. Former Kentucky Gov. John Y. Brown, who had done quite well with his Kentucky Fried Chicken concept and made “Colonel” Harlan Sanders a legendary figure, tried to do the same with Ollie, who ran a tiny burger joint in Miami Beach. Ollie’s top-secret spice combo reportedly includes 32 ingredients, and Brown believed it was the burger version of the Colonel’s chicken recipe. The story didn’t end quite the same for the Ollie’s franchise, but a few of the Ollie’s Trollies have hung on, including locations in Cincinnati and Washington, D.C.
When I recently dined at the Louisville Ollie’s with Amy, her son Davis and his friend Jackson, the delicious burger and fries brought back a flood of youthful memories. These spices, these burgers and fries, are just … well … perfect somehow. Jackson even went so far as to proclaim Ollie’s food to be “like being naked in a pool of kittens.” (Give him a break, he’s just a kid.)
My lunch experience, which cost a measly $6, prompted a Google search for more info about Ollie’s. Turns out there are a number of people across the country pining for this stuff after years of deprivation. There is even a black market of sorts for recipes that purport to reveal Ollie’s secrets. One of them has only about 15 ingredients, including both Heinz 57 and A.1. steak sauces. Um, no.
But I struck gold when I found a retired executive from Lum’s restaurants, which served Ollie’s burgers and fries back in the day. Dennis DeBlasis, who was a director of operations for Lum’s, doesn’t know the recipe himself, but he still has access to the spice mixes, and he sells them for $10.95 per pound via his website (www.lums-recipes.com). He assured me the other recipes I found online were bogus.
“Anyone who states they have the recipe is dreaming,” DeBlasis claims. “John Y. Brown created Colonel Sanders and also Ollie’s (restaurants). The spices and recipes are not known to the public.”
He noted that all restaurants that served the Ollie’s burgers and fries bought the spices from a single distributor in 1-pound bags — which is what he now sells. “This is the closest anyone’s come to the original (spices) as designed by Ollie,” he says.
So I decided to see for myself. I bought his spices and recruited Amy’s help, and together we made Ollie’s burgers and fries for dinner on a recent evening. And it’s true — the spices I bought from DeBlasis, so help me, taste just like the real deal.
It’s not a difficult meal to make — mix the burger spices with water to create a marinade, and add them to Thousand Island dressing to create the bun sauce. Marinate the burgers, cook, top with mozzarella on a bun slathered with the sauce, and guess what? MOUTH-GASM. And as for the fries? We baked instead of fried (slightly healthier), then simply shook the hot fries in a large bowl with the spices (use lots for a greater kick). We melted as we devoured our delicious dinner. If, God forbid, Ollie’s downtown ever closes, we’re set.
But getting back to my original point: To ensure I had the proper perspective for comparison, I had Ollie’s for lunch the day we made the burgers. You know, for research purposes. However, two Ollieburgers and a couple of potatoes’ worth of extremely spicy Ollie’s fries within seven hours of each other is not something I recommend. Sadly, even something as good as Ollie’s should be enjoyed in moderation.
Therefore, my next experiment is to see if the drug store brand of Alka-Seltzer is just as effective as the real thing. And if so, can I make it at home.