Nathan Masters: While California might evoke images of quinoa and wheatgrass shots, there's a richer, juicier story simmering beneath.
Consider In-N-Out, our homegrown pride, a civic institution.
Even health-conscious Angelenos who sidestep McDonald's take out-of-state visitors here for a taste of a double-double, animal style.
But here's a side order of truth.
Those iconic golden arches?
They, too, have California roots.
Fast food, with its speedy service and instant satisfaction, first gained traction in greater Los Angeles, driving a culinary revolution across the globe.
By the time McDonald's landed in the Soviet Union in 1990, marking a turning point in superpower relations, the world was hooked.
Lines snaked for hours in Moscow, all for a bite of the long-forbidden Big Mac.
Behind this worldwide craze is a local story, a culinary shift driven by the gears of California's automobile obsession.
Announcer: This program was made possible in part by a grant from the Ralph M. Parsons Foundation and the Los Angeles County Department of Arts & Culture and Creative Recovery LA.
Masters: Before we queued up at the drive-thru, we parked at the drive-in.
It was here that car culture first collided with food to create a completely new kind of dining experience, where carhops rolled straight to your window and you could enjoy an entire meal without ever leaving your parking space.
The drive-in's golden age faded long ago, but its legacy purrs on at one cherished Burbank establishment.
Cruise down Riverside Drive and let its 70-foot neon sign be your guide.
This Bob's Big Boy opened in 1949.
And while the carhops no longer glide across its blacktop, the spirit of that bygone era comes alive every Friday night at Bob's classic car show.
I met up there with author and chef George Geary, whose book "Made in California" explains how places like Bob's changed the world.
So, there aren't many places where you can see the nexus between car culture and food culture.
Geary: No, and we're losing them one by one... Masters: Yeah.
Tonight is a bit of a throwback, a nod to their heritage, right?
Geary: Because it was in the late forties when this place opened.
Masters: How long have you been coming to these car shows?
Woman: Well, to Bob's I've been coming 25, 30 years.
Masters: You wish they still had the carhops here?
Woman: I do.
[Laughs] Masters: This one is beautiful.
Geary: It is pristine.
1957 Bel Air.
My dad had one and what I remember as a kid is the drink spot that you'd put your drink in.
It's not a cup holder but it's like an indentation.
Masters: You wouldn't dare eat a burger and fries in here.
Man: No.
[Laughter] [Horn honks] Man: I've been coming here for 40 years.
Back in the day, we used to park under the shade here.
Serve hamburgers and awesome time.
[Engine rumbling] Masters: Bob's Big Boy serves up more than just juicy burgers.
It's also a feast for the eyes with its iconic Googie architecture.
This style, which revved up alongside L.A.'s car culture in the 1940s and 1950s, is marked by its daring angles, vivid colors, and dazzling neon, all designed to catch the eye of passing motorists.
And while many Googie structures succumbed to changing tastes in the eighties and nineties, preservationists saved this classic example, now a cherished local landmark.
We take it for granted today that restaurants are built around the automobile, but this car show, it reminds you of how much of a novelty it was that a place like Bob's Big Boy was designed around the car.
Geary: There are hardly any back east like this, and it's California, because of our weather.
And our car culture.
That's where everything starts, is our car culture.
Masters: So, what is the story of Bob's Big Boy?
Geary: There was a kid that kept coming in--it's how the story goes--and he has a slingshot in his back pocket.
They made a few burgers and then they doubled it.
Made the Bob's Big Boy out of it.
Masters: And he became a very memorable icon.
Geary: Yes.
Masters: So, the original Bob's in Glendale is gone.
No more.
Geary: Oh, yeah.
It was a small, little stand.
They ground their own meat, because people really didn't know what hamburgers were.
'36, you know, you didn't-- Masters: Kind of a novelty.
Geary: Absolutely.
It's interesting--foods like that, people are surprised.
Your grandmother didn't know what one was.
They never had one.
They franchise the Big Boy hamburger, not the whole concept, because that was very unique.
It had two patties.
Bread in between.
Masters: You say they invented the double--double burger?
Geary: See?
"Original double deck hamburger" on their sign.
Masters: They're proud of it.
Geary: Yeah.
They have it in neon.
If it's in neon, it's right.
But yeah, they started that in the thirties.
People started copying it, but it was the original.
Masters: So, is the Big Mac then just, like, a double-deck knock-off?
Geary: I say yes.
[Laughter] But don't quote me.
Allegedly.
Masters: Allegedly.
OK. Geary: There's so many fast-food companies that started in California, and that's what's great about all of them, because they all have their unique history of where they are placed in our society.
Masters: From drive-ins like Bob's Big Boy, the blueprint for modern fast food began to unfold.
Out in San Bernardino, the McDonald brothers ran a similar operation--a drive-in barbecue joint along bustling Route 66.
Their burgers sizzled with popularity, yet they noticed a bottleneck.
Teens drawn by the carhops and ample parking made it their evening rendezvous, slowing down sales.
This spurred a revolutionary idea.
In 1948, the brothers closed their drive-in for a transformative renovation.
On reopening, a fresh concept emerged.
Carhops were history, replaced by a walk-up window, fast service, low prices, and no tipping.
The menu, now streamlined, spotlighted one star-- the hamburger.
A gamble?
Absolutely.
But for Dick and Mac McDonald, it paid off.
McDonald's as we know it was born.
While the original location was demolished in the seventies, an early McDonald's franchise built in 1953 survives in Downey, at Lakewood and Florence.
I caught up there with author and journalist Chris Nichols, who helped save this iconic Googie structure in the nineties.
Can I get you some lunch?
Nichols: Yeah.
OK. Can I get the original cheeseburger, please?
Masters: I'll have a Big Mac.
Now, when you walk up, one of the things that you notice is there are no tables or chairs here.
There's no place to sit down and eat.
Nichols: No, and there never was.
This was developed so that you come up, get your food, and you're outta here.
Masters: What's interesting is you look at the double arches there, the M, I mean, you see the roof in that, right?
Nichols: Yeah.
That's the two arches and the roofline creating the original logo, which became the M, which they're still using to this day.
Masters: That's a logo people will recognize anywhere in the world.
Nichols: For sure, for sure.
Masters: And it started right here.
Nichols: [Indistinct] architecture.
Masters: Wow.
What's so special about this McDonald's?
Nichols: It is the last of its kind.
It's the oldest McDonald's in the world.
It's a great piece of architecture, it's colorful, and you can get a hamburger here.
Master: I don't know about you, but it's always grated on me a little bit that Southern California is--is always a little undersold in the official corporate history of McDonald's.
Nichols: The L.A. story is that the McDonald brothers had 8 or 9 restaurants and they had a person in L.A. that was selling franchises, but he wasn't very good.
Kroc took it and it caught fire.
He had the energy and the money and the ability and the drive to build this huge corporation.
Masters: What was McDonald's like before Ray Kroc?
Nichols: Well, they had moved, physically moved, their little drive-in from Monrovia out to San Bernardino and reopened it as a very traditional 1930s-style carhop drive-in.
And then in 1948, they had this epiphany that they should fire all the waitresses, shut the place down, and start over again.
And that's when they came up with what they called the Speedee Service system.
Their idea of how to make hamburgers fast and cheap and good.
It was a totally new way of doing hot food ready when you are.
There were all kinds of innovations that these guys came up with.
There was a strange device that squirts the ketchup and mustard perfectly on the burger.
There's an extra-long spatula.
There are all these technical innovations that made their Speedee Service system, which is what this is all built on, possible, and they were all handcrafted out in San Bernardino.
So, it's a great story of innovation, of technology, and it became hugely successful, like overnight.
There were lines of people coming.
There were truck drivers and kids and families, and it was super cheap, even at the time.
It was an instant hit, and that's how Kroc found out about it.
Masters: So, sometimes, it seems like everything wacky and eye-catching that makes L.A. so distinctive is always at risk of disappearing.
Nichols: I hold these truths to be self-evident, that these buildings are important and special and artful and deserve protection.
For me as an architecture lover, I want to see the building, you know?
I want to experience it, and if I can experience 1953 in full color and 3 dimensions, like I can here, oh, my God, I'm ecstatic.
All the planes, all the red and white tile and the canted windows, it's animated and in motion and exciting.
It's a crazy symphony of shapes and colors.
Masters: You'll never get tired of looking at it.
Nichols: Right?
And I don't.
I love it so much.
Masters: What did it take to save this place?
Nichols: Right around the time the conservancy was fighting to save the Downey McDonald's, they were also fighting to save the cathedral in downtown.
And so, they were fighting the Catholic Church and the McDonald's Corporation at the same time.
Masters: Two of the world's most powerful institutions.
Nichols: And it was a huge effort.
In this particular case, there was pushback, because McDonald's whole schtick is that they're standardized.
Everything works the same.
You get the same food.
The same equipment.
The buildings look the same.
And this has none of those.
But they finally came around to seeing that the benefit outweighed the cost.
This little museum is, is pretty great.
Masters: Hello.
[Laughs] Nichols: Every fast-food place is now a behemoth.
But this was Dick and Mac McDonald.
These were real people and small businesspeople and they were trying to be innovative and trying to come up with something that hadn't been done before and new takes on things, and they really invented a new lifestyle, for better or worse, that came out of L.A. Masters: I'll confess.
Before this visit, I never thought a McDonald's could leave me spellbound.
Yet this striking Googie structure is no mere eye candy.
It embodies the innovations that emerged from the marriage of car culture with commercial architecture.
And few have studied the fruits of that union more closely than author and collector Jim Hyman.
One of the first children of this marriage was the programmatic architecture.
The whole point was to catch people's eye.
Hyman: The idea was if you're driving down, say, La Brea, block away, all of a sudden you see a giant pig snout, and at night it's all lined in neon.
[Laughter] Masters: The architecture essentially functioned as signage in itself, right?
It advertised what you could do inside.
Hyman: Yes.
It's an architectural term, programmatic architecture.
I mean, this was totally condemned by the architects.
This was crap architecture, junk architecture.
And consequently, no one really documented it or paid attention to it.
It's the evolution of the roadside model.
It goes from this kind of simplistic thing into something a little bit more sophisticated, like the drive-ins of the thirties, and then it evolves into "Let's get rid of the property because we can't make money off of it and it's too expensive anyway.
How can we still get attention?"
So, the McDonald brothers get the golden arches.
And a place like Simon's, that was designed by Wayne McAllister.
He was pretty profound in terms of local architecture.
Masters: I mean, he was the architect behind the Bob's Big Boy.
Hyman: Yes.
Masters: Yeah.
Hyman: They weren't programmatic, because by this time, the attention was with the pylons, mostly, and the neon is, you know, very important.
Masters: Yeah, of course at night, yeah.
The Tam O'Shanter fits into this, too.
Hyman: In '22, the Tam O'Shanter opens up with the Montgomery brothers and Lawrence Frank, who had Van de Kamp's windmills.
Masters: "California's quaintest highway eating house."
Ha ha ha!
It's funny, because you wouldn't think of it as a highway eating house today, right?
It's across from a Best Buy.
[Laughter] Hyman: If you look, there's a little stand here that you can see right there.
Masters: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Hyman: Is a drive-up.
So, you would drive up here, they would put your food on a plank, and at that time, these sedans, you know, you could just put it through the sedan with your food on it.
Masters: Just a wooden plank.
They'd just push it-- [Laughter] Hyman: They experimented with it for two or 3 years, then they abandoned it, and then they came back to it.
But initially, this was the only place that would serve you food in a car.
Masters: They were innovators.
Hyman: They were innovators.
They weren't afraid of doing something really kind of crazy.
Masters: 1920s, the car is practically everywhere.
Hyman: Yeah.
Masters: There are restaurants practically everywhere.
But what about Southern California made the marriage of those two here so fruitful?
Hyman: Cheap land is certainly one.
Tons of roadways that aren't very inhabited.
Weather is certainly a factor.
And then you've got Hollywood.
Masters: At the time, 1920s, we tend to think of L.A. as just this endless urban sprawl today, but there were a lot of gaps in that, right?
Open countryside.
Hyman: Big gaps.
And here you can kind of see the idea.
So, that's Fairfax and Wilshire.
That's where the Academy Museum is now.
You know, but at that time, in the thirties, late thirties, look around there.
There's not much.
So, they would find the main highways, mostly.
Valley Boulevard would be one.
Foothill Boulevard would be one in the San Gabriel Valley.
Masters: Which later became Route 66.
Hyman: Yes.
Masters: If highways rewrote the rules for restaurants, Route 66 led the culinary revolution.
A ribbon of concrete stretching from the Lake Michigan shore to the Santa Monica coast, the so-called mother road brought millions of hungry motorists through Southern California and into the parking lots of local entrepreneurs.
Not from the McDonald brothers' pioneering burger stand, an unassuming Mexican eatery in San Bernardino planted the seeds for not just one but two tortilla empires--Taco Bell and Del Taco.
I joined "Los Angeles Times" columnist Gustavo Arellano for a chat and a taco at this local landmark-- Mitla Cafe.
So, before we go in, I gotta see this sign that you wrote about in your book, the "Real Mexican food."
Arellano: Right up here.
Little boy with Mitla Cafe sombrero, the serape.
"Real Mexican food," but the "real" is underlined, and it's looking right across the street.
That was Glen Bell's original burger place.
He would come back to Mitla, get the tacos, then go try to reverse engineer, and he kept doing that again and again until the owner one day is like, "Look, I know what you're trying to do.
Let me just teach you how to make those tacos and..." Masters: He invited him in the kitchen.
Arellano: He invited him in the kitchen.
Taught him.
Glen Bell stayed there about a year.
Goes about a mile and a half a year later to open up his first taco chain, and the rest is history.
Masters: A lot going on here.
Let's go inside... Arellano: Yeah, no, no.
I'm hungry, so, let's go eat.
Masters: So, Taco Bell introduced much of the world to Mexican food, but how many people realize that it started right here at Mitla Cafe in San Bernardino?
Arellano: Only the people who read my book.
Not that many people, sadly.
But especially the people who grew up here in the west side of San Bernardino, where Mitla Cafe is.
This is a historic barrio in San Bernardino.
This is a place where there's a lot of civil right struggles, a place of resilience.
It's also a place with damn good food.
Masters: So, what is the Glen Bell story?
Arellano: So, he comes back from World War II.
He wants to make money, but he can't make money selling burgers because the McDonald brothers are literally right up Mt.
Vernon, already on their way to become, you know, McDonald's.
So, then he says, "Well, maybe I'll make tacos," and his wife at the time and others are like, "That's ridiculous.
No one's gonna buy tacos from a White man."
So, he sets up his Bell's Burger, a small, little restaurant which is right across the street.
Sells burgers during the day.
At night, he comes and eats some tacos.
Then he tries to reverse engineer them.
He said that his innovation-- he never claimed to have invented the taco, the hard-shell taco, but that his innovation was prefabricating the shells to make it easier.
Because here at Mitla Cafe, they still sell those hard-shell tacos, recipe almost unchanged since their opening in 1937, but they fry them fresh.
That's the key.
People come out here to make pilgrimages for this taco.
It is legit good food.
Are these the tacos that I grew up eating?
No.
Are these the tacos that I will drive out of my way in order to eat a couple?
Absolutely.
Salud.
Masters: Yeah.
Cheers.
This is not something that I'm used to seeing on the menu at-- at a Mexican restaurant, right?
Arellano: Mm-hmm.
Masters: A hard-shell taco.
Arellano: You don't see those anymore.
This is a recipe that the founders of Mitla Cafe brought from Jalisco, so, people say Mexicans don't eat hard-shell tacos.
That's absolutely not true.
Masters: Very authentic.
Arellano: It absolutely is.
Not only that, it's a time capsule to when this restaurant opened in 1937.
In his autobiography, "Taco Titan: The Glen Bell Story," he gave the address of the restaurant where he got, quote unquote, inspired to make tacos.
So, when I read it, when I was doing the research for "Taco USA," my book, I'm like, "I wonder if that restaurant is still even here," and I had never heard of Mitla Cafe before I started doing "Taco USA."
So, I remember on an afternoon driving out here, I get off the 215.
I come up here.
I come in the diner.
I'm like, "I cannot believe this restaurant is still here.
Let's try the food."
And I've been coming here and telling its story ever since.
Masters: Glen Bell not only the founder of Taco Bell but has connections to the origins of, well, of course, Taco Bell's main competitor Del Taco, but then also Wienerschnitzel.
Arellano: Glen Bell was really a Johnny Appleseed, because one of his employees right across the street, Ed Hackbarth, he ended up founding Del Taco in Yermo, of all places, all the way out there in the desert.
Glen just thinks of the idea randomly for Der Wienerschnitzel, gives it to his employee, who opens it up.
He didn't want any credit for it.
He's like, "Go for it."
Here in San Bernardino, it's this interesting nexus of ambition, of potential, and of transportation.
From here, so much of fast-food culture spread across the United States.
Not too far away in Baldwin Park, that's where In-N-Out is.
Masters: On Route 66.
Arellano: Exactly.
Here in the west side, this was segregated.
Mitla Cafe was sort of an entry point for White folks to feel comfortable with Mexicans, but it was also a place for the Mexican community to meet and unite with the Black community, because San Bernardino historically has been a Black city and a Mexican city and then, of course, with White folks ruling it.
And coming out of here, like in the late 1940s, that's when you have Lopez vs. Seccombe, which is the case that desegregated swimming pools right here in San Bernardino for the rest of Southern California, and then, of course, later on in the United States.
So, it's easy to talk about how delicious the food is, but what makes Mitla even that much more special is its role in civil rights.
Nothing against Taco Bell.
Nothing against McDonald's or Del Taco.
They did not play that role.
They never played that role.
They introduced Mexican food to a wider audience, sure, but they were not giving sustenance to people who needed the sustenance to be able to fight bigger battles.
Masters: And that happened right here in this very dining room.
Arellano: In this dining room, in that banquet hall, in the little bar right there, and it's still happening to this day.
They really care about their community.
Whereas other people might have left, they're like "No.
We're staying here.
This is our town.
We're gonna make it to what it was and really make it better."
Route 66 is almost an afterthought to them.
It's like, "OK, maybe the rest of the United States forgot about us, because it's not Route 66 anymore.
That's OK. We're not leaving."
Masters: Yeah.
Cruise west down Route 66 from Mitla Cafe and you'll arrive in the San Gabriel Valley suburb of Baldwin Park, home to another place steeped in fast-food lore.
It was here back in 1948 that Harry and Esther Snyder opened a modest burger stand that eventually grew into a cherished local chain.
But In-N-Out didn't just win the hearts of Southern Californians.
It revolutionized fast food with a stroke of genius-- the two-way drive-thru speaker, making traditional carhops and walk-up windows relics of the past.
Today, this company, still family-owned, is famously guarded, but that didn't stop "L.A. Times" journalist Stacy Perman from unwrapping its story in her 2009 book.
Stacy and I grabbed some In-N-Out to go for a chat--where else?-- in the front seat of my Jeep.
So, Stacy, you wrote, like, the book about In-N-Out.
Perman: I did.
Masters: And, I mean, they're a famously private, some would say secretive, company.
That must have been a challenge writing about a company that keeps to itself.
Perman: You have this chain, this beloved chain that everybody in--not just Southern California but literally the world knows, as I found, but they knew nothing about it, because they're so private.
It was a fascinating challenge to kind of go down this rabbit hole and just learn about this history and its influence on Southern California fast food and beyond.
Masters: Why do you think In-N-Out is so beloved?
Perman: In large part, it's because it's family-owned.
They didn't go corporate.
They refuse to franchise or go public.
They've stayed the same.
The menu--the burger that you're eating is the same burger that you could've eaten when Truman was president.
You go inside, you think you've ben transported to post-war Southern California.
Masters: So, In-N-Out, the name describes the concept that back in the forties and fifties was quite revolutionary.
Perman: When Harry and Esther Snyder, the founding couple of In-N-Out Burger, moved to Baldwin Park, they had no money.
They got this little triangular spit of land, so, they couldn't kind of replicate the style of the time.
But Harry was a ingenious guy and he was a ham radio enthusiast and a kind of amateur engineer, and he rigged up this two-way radio system.
He said, "OK, someone will drive up, they'll order through this little radio, and then drive through and out."
And that's how it got the name In-N-Out.
A lot of people were confused.
They would send their sons out to help them figure out how to actually order.
Masters: It's funny because what you're describing is a experience that's so common to most Americans, going through the drive-thru, but at the time, it was a novelty.
Perman: No one had seen it before.
It was, like, high technology.
It was kind of the starting point for the modern-day fast-food restaurant.
The funny thing is, is Harry never took out a patent on the device.
Masters: Oh.
Perman: This time in America, you know, things had changed.
Women were part of the workforce.
People were on the go and busy.
So, the kind of sit-down dinner was changing, and the highway system meant that people could go from Point A to Point Z in the space of a few hours.
So, eating on the go became pretty vogue.
Masters: They give you the option, and probably they did back then, too, of whether you want to eat it in the car, and they'll put it in a little box like this for you, right, or put it in a bag and you bring it home.
Perman: Correct.
Masters: Yeah.
I've never noticed that at another fast-food chain.
Perman: I--thinking about that, I think you're right.
Yeah.
Masters: Now, the In-N-Out story is also linked to that of another fast-food chain, Carl's Jr.?
Perman: Yes.
Carl Karcher was younger than the Snyders but he was kind of the elder statesman of what was fast food then.
He was one of the pioneers.
So, by the time Harry and Esther were about to start In-N-Out, they sought him out.
They met and they became, actually, lifelong friends.
He gave them advice and the advice was always focus on the product and the personal touch, and never give up.
These are kind of really kind of old-timey, simple philosophies, but they worked, and the Snyders took them to heart.
Masters: In the early days of fast food, if you walked into a different--like, a Carl's Jr. or a McDonald's, was it common to see squeaky-clean aesthetics, the smiling faces?
Perman: I think it was, because they were really all mom and pop.
So, there was a real, like, skin in the game.
This was your place.
It wasn't this franchise, faceless, nameless, corporate America.
Masters: Which is what all the other fast-food chains have become, unfortunately.
But In-N-Out's managed to keep that alive.
Perman: Well, it goes back to Harry's philosophy, which was keep it simple, do one thing, and do it well, which is why the menu has 4 items.
They didn't add Happy Meals or specials.
There are no movie tie-ins.
Masters: It's funny that something that is really so conservative can also seem so radical today.
Perman: Yeah.
In terms of both fast food and corporate America, they really run counterintuitively, and yet they're wildly successful and profitable.
It didn't hurt the bottom line.
Masters: So, when you were writing and researching the book, you must've had a lot of In-N-Out.
[Laughs] Perman: More than I care to admit, yes.
That's where I got some really great stories of people who would tell me, like, the lengths they would go to for an In-N-Out, since there's so few of them.
There were stories of flying them to, you know, Minnesota for someone's birthday.
I will say I do feel like I taste history when I bite into a burger.
Masters: That's, again, a big part of what they're selling.
They're selling history and nostalgia.
Nostalgia may just be In-N-Out's secret sauce.
Long after its competitors shed their unique charms, In-N-Out stays true to fast food's origins with its distinctive, car-oriented experience.
The long lines winding through its drive-thrus echo a simpler time, when fast food, now a global juggernaut, was merely a local craze.
Preservationists lament the erasure of everything wacky or crazy or Googie about Southern California architecture, but it's far from a forgotten tale.
Once you know the signs, the heritage reveals itself.
A repurposed Wienerschnitzel A-frame.
The Spanish fantasy bell tower of a former Taco Bell.
Downey's iconic golden arches.
They hold stories, transporting us to days when fast food wasn't just a meal but a memorable experience.
Narrator: To the teenager, the automobile's function and importance go far beyond his transportational needs.
Man: My name is Dave Coleman.
I grew up here in Downey and on my 16th birthday, got my driver's license.
This is the first place I came.
Masters: We borrowed this specific car from the Zimmerman Automobile Driving Museum because it was the first model to have standard cup holders.
All right, let's try it.
Geary: All right.
I think it'll work.
And there you go.
Masters: Hey.
Geary: ...it goes in.
[Laughter] Announcer: This program was made possible in part by a grant from the Ralph M. Parsons Foundation and the Los Angeles County Department of Arts & Culture and Creative Recovery LA.
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