History of the Po-Boy
A favorite of poor and rich boys alike.
New Orleans, or N’awlin’s as the locals call it, is known as a city of culture, entertainment, and cuisine. It is a fount of culinary delights with traditional dishes rooted in the deep South, Europe, and beyond! Among the vast array of New Orleans icons is the Po-boy. It is a beast of a sandwich as versatile in flavor and size as the city it was created in.
The Po-boy was created by brothers Bennie and Clovis Martin. The Martin Brothers moved to New Orleans in 1910 and worked as streetcar conductors before opening the Martin Brothers’ Coffee Stand and Restaurant in the French Market in 1922.
In the late 1920’s, streetcar motormen and conductors throughout the nation began a union strike. Sympathetic to the strikers’ cause the Martin Brothers vowed to provide free meals to the men. In order to maintain their promise they provided the strikers with large sandwiches free of charge.
In an attempt to salvage the wasted bread typically cut off the ends of French bread loafs the brothers, with the help of baker John Gendusa, ingeniously created a new kind of loaf, uniform in shape from end to end. This allowed them to use the entire loaf and the new shape was ideal for making huge sandwiches with lots of fillings. This innovation, along with the notoriety that their generosity earned them, garnered the Martin Brothers wide acclaim and a mountain of business.
Bennie Martin said of their efforts to help the strikers, “We fed those men free of charge until the strike ended. Whenever we saw one of the striking men coming, one of us would say, ‘Here comes another poor boy!” Eventually the phrase stuck to the sandwich creating the world’s first Po-boys.