The Brothers Who Invented the Po-Boy
Benny and Clovis Martin were streetcar conductors who changed jobs and changed culinary history. In 1922, the brothers opened a coffee stand in the French Market, a modest beginning for what would become one of the most important restaurants in New Orleans history. Seven years later, in 1929, they would create the sandwich that defines the city's food culture: the po-boy.
The origin story is as good as any in American food history. In 1929, over a thousand unionized streetcar drivers went on strike against the New Orleans Railway and Light Company. The Martin brothers, former streetcar men themselves, sympathized with their old colleagues and began feeding the striking workers for free at their restaurant, which by then had grown from a coffee stand into a full-service establishment.
Another Poor Boy
As the striking workers came through the door, the Martin brothers would call out to each other: "Here comes another poor boy." The phrase stuck. The sandwich they served the strikers — a long loaf of French bread stuffed with whatever fillings were available — became known as the "poor boy," eventually contracted to "po-boy," and a New Orleans institution was born.
The genius of the po-boy was its simplicity and its generosity. The bread was the foundation — crusty French bread with a light, airy interior, baked in the long loaves that New Orleans bakeries had been producing for generations. The fillings could be anything: roast beef, ham, fried shrimp, oysters, catfish, or whatever the kitchen had on hand. The portions were enormous, because the Martin brothers understood that a sandwich for a working man needed to be substantial enough to get him through a day on the picket line.
The Hot Roast Beef
Today's hot roast beef po-boys — dripping with gravy, the bread soaking up the juice until it reaches that perfect state of structural compromise where it is almost falling apart but not quite — are the closest relatives of the originals that the Martin brothers served to the striking streetcar workers. The roast beef po-boy is New Orleans' signature sandwich, a thing of messy, glorious perfection that cannot be replicated anywhere else because the bread cannot be replicated anywhere else, and without the bread, it is just a roast beef sandwich.
The Martin brothers did not set out to create a cultural icon. They set out to feed their friends. But the sandwich they invented became the most democratic food in New Orleans — available at corner stores and white-tablecloth restaurants, eaten by construction workers and corporate lawyers, dressed or undressed, on French bread that is baked fresh every morning in bakeries across the city. Benny and Clovis Martin were streetcar conductors who became restaurateurs who became, without intending to, the creators of one of America's greatest sandwiches. Another poor boy, indeed.
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