Stale Bread, Leftover Gravy? Voila! A Sandwich Is Born

When Philippe Mathieu of Aix-en-Provence arrived in Los Angeles in 1903, Angelenos were living in startling culinary isolation -- some would say desolation.

Mathieu would change all that. He launched a frontier version of French cuisine, inventing the French dip sandwich (with a little push from an angry customer) and founded Philippe the Original, a downtown landmark.

Within months of his arrival, he opened a French deli at 6th and Alameda streets, where customers could buy French rolls and sliced meat and rummage through deep barrels of pickled cucumbers, onions and olives to create their own sandwich.

In 1906, he and his new bride, French-born Josephine Chaix, worked together behind the counter making sandwiches for diners. Later, their two young daughters, Alice and Berthe, would pitch in, peeling and dicing 50-pound barrels of onions -- shedding tears all the way.

“My mother told me about how she always had to walk a few blocks away to the Cudahy Meatpacking Co. and carry back two buckets of animal blood for her father [Mathieu] to make his rich sauteed boudin noir [blood sausage], a house specialty,” recalled Philippe Guilhem, Mathieu’s grandson, who lives in Oklahoma.

Mathieu’s daughter Alice, an entrepreneur herself, “ran a newspaper and ice cream stand in front of the restaurant,” Guilhem said.

Faced with too much work and too many customers, Mathieu recruited his brother, Arbin, from France to join the business, which he did before venturing off to begin a restaurant of his own.

In 1908, with a blitz of advertising and promotion, Mathieu launched his first Philippe restaurant at 3rd and Alameda streets. He served up liver pate, blood sausage, roast beef, pork and potato salad. Sunday customers could feast on the special: roasted sheep’s head.

Mathieu tried to remind folks of home by offering all they could eat, plus a pint of what he described as a “good claret wine,” all for 25 cents. Although he cooked with passion and finesse, it was his homemade wine that helped draw the crowds.

Over the years, Mathieu’s restaurant hopscotched along Alameda Street, where railroad tracks uneasily coexisted with trolleys and other vehicles. For a short time, he opened an upscale spot on Main Street called the Poodle Dog Cafe, where City Hall East now stands.

His big break came in 1918, when he returned to the commercial and industrial area of Los Angeles on Aliso Street. Here, amid the scent of hops and malt from the nearby Eastside Brewery and the soap from the White King factory, the “Philippe the Original French Dipped Sandwich” was born.

It wasn’t a fancy place. There were stools at the counter and sawdust on the floor to take care of spills from the rushed noontime crowd. A big jar of pickled eggs typically stood on the bar next to the pickled pigs’ feet.

Guilhem describes the moment of creation, for which we can thank a Los Angeles firefighter:

“It must have been a Monday, because the leftover weekend rolls were stale, when a fireman from a nearby station walked in and ordered a sandwich. When he bit into it, he must have gotten mad because he walked into the kitchen and complained. Seeing some gravy in the bottom of a large pan of roast meat, he asked my grandfather if he could dip the roll in it,” Guilhem said.

Mathieu did, and right away five or six other firemen wanted the same. Each sandwich sold for a dime.

“It was a good idea, but that small amount of gravy in the pan didn’t last. But it put me wise. The next day I made a gallon of the gravy -- and still we ran out of it,” Mathieu said in a 1951 interview.

Philippe prospered by dipping 1,500 rolls a day and charging 35 cents for a full meal. Mathieu soon began buying up property downtown and in the San Fernando Valley plus a ranch in Escondido, where he covertly made wine and brandy during Prohibition.

Camaraderie seasoned the food and the atmosphere as burly railroad, brewery and factory workers rubbed elbows with judges and politicians. At night, Mathieu and his friends met behind the kitchen door for poker games, sipping brandy and wine from coffee cups.

Mathieu served up his last French dip in 1927, during Prohibition, when he was 50 and in ill health. The successful restaurateur -- who was known to be a bit tightfisted with the buck as well as with the ingredients in his secret recipes -- sold his restaurant to a family of three brothers, Frank, Harry and David Martin. Their family still runs it today.

Despite his failing health, Mathieu lived another three decades; he died in 1960, at age 82.

Philippe’s lore includes more than food. On a Sunday morning in January 1948, before the Hollywood Freeway gouged the Aliso Street neighborhood, a Santa Fe El Capitan train engine crashed through a Union Station wall, into an electric trolley pole -- and almost into the laps of Philippe’s diners. The brakeman jumped out before the crash, but the engineer stayed on until the engine stopped, hanging 20 feet above Aliso Street.

Three years later, when the building was torn down, workers found where Mathieu had hollowed out an upstairs wall to keep a Prohibition stash of wine and brandy. A full 30-gallon jug of brandy was still there.

Philippe restaurant reopened in another brick building across from Union Station on Alameda Street, where it remains today. The building once housed a machine shop on the ground floor and a brothel upstairs.

In 1955, the surviving Martin brother, Frank, was joined in the business by his son-in-law, Bill Binder, who has since retired. Binder’s sons, John and Richard, currently run the business.

The restaurant has hardly changed since 1927. It retains the same ambience and the same recipes. There are no-nonsense servers; long, communal, red-topped tables; an old-fashioned, fully stocked candy counter; and a row of phone booths against the wall, where the Binders say a naked man once dropped in a coin and hunkered down for a long conversation.

There’s a penny scale, thought to be the very one used by Norman Rockwell for his painting, “Weighing In,” which shows a jockey doing just that after a race. A copy of the work hangs beside it.

“We’re pretty sure it’s the same one Rockwell used for his model, because both it and the one in the painting have a chip of enamel missing on the money box,” Richard Binder said.

In the 1970s, William Holden was dressed as beat cop Bumper Morgan when he stopped for a sandwich while filming “The Blue Knight.”

Another time, Bill Binder remembers, “Mickey Rooney [got] impatient for his lamb sandwich [and] began pounding on the counter.”

The place has had its share of celebrity clientele.

“One of our waitresses kept walking around in awe saying, ‘Champagne, champagne,’ ” Richard Binder said. “I told her we didn’t carry champagne when someone said, ‘She’s saying, “Sean Penn.” ’ “

For nearly 50 years, the price of coffee held steady at 5 cents a cup. In 1977, management threw caution to the wind and upped it to a dime -- its current price, tax included.

These days, French dips start at $4.40.

But come November, the restaurant will slide back in time, at least for a few hours.

To mark Philippe’s 95th anniversary milestone Nov. 3, prices will be rolled back from 4 to 8 p.m. that day. Those 10-cent sandwiches are likely to create something of a mob scene.