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In-N-Out Burger (Baldwin Park)
In-N-Out Burger's story starts on October 22, 1948, when Harry and Esther Snyder opened a hundred-square-foot stand at the corner of Francisquito and Garvey in Baldwin Park — the first drive-through hamburger stand in California, built around a two-way speaker box that let customers order without leaving their cars. That single innovation reshaped how fast food would be served across the state for decades afterward. The original structure didn't survive; it was demolished when Interstate 10 was routed through the site, and a replacement building that opened nearby in 1954 was itself closed in 2004 and torn down in 2011. Rather than let the site disappear entirely, the company built a working replica of the first store in 2014, close to the original footprint, open a few days a week for burgers cooked in the same style the Snyders served in 1948. The menu at any In-N-Out location has stayed almost defiantly simple for more than seventy-five years — a short, unchanging lineup built around a thin, smash-style griddled patty, American cheese, hand-leafed lettuce, tomato, and the chain's signature spread, with a "secret menu" of off-menu customizations that's become part of the brand's mythology in its own right. The company has remained privately held and family-controlled the entire time, resisting the franchising and rapid national expansion that most fast-food chains of its era eventually took on. Visiting the Baldwin Park replica is as close as it's possible to get to tasting where California's drive-through burger culture actually began — a small, deliberately preserved heritage site standing near the freeway that displaced the original, run by a company that's kept the same recipe and the same family ownership since Harry and Esther first opened the window. Every drive-through burger stand in the state, knowingly or not, is still working in the shadow of that hundred-square-foot start.
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Original Tommy's
Original Tommy's opened on May 15, 1946, at the corner of Beverly and Rampart, founded by Tom Koulax, the son of Greek immigrants. Business was slow at first, but it picked up steadily enough that the property eventually expanded across the intersection to keep up with the crowds — a modest hot dog-and-hamburger stand that grew into one of the defining names in Los Angeles fast food. The chili burger is the entire reason people line up: a griddled patty topped with a distinctive meaty chili, chopped onion, mustard, and tomato, built to be eaten standing at an outdoor counter as much as sitting down. The same chili shows up on hot dogs and over fries, but it's the burger that made the name, and it's stayed the standard against which nearly every other Los Angeles chili burger gets measured. Tommy's began expanding in the 1970s and grew to roughly 30 locations by the mid-2000s; today the chain operates more than 30 stands across California and Nevada, headquartered in Monrovia. That success has bred an entire ecosystem of imitators — a 2019 Los Angeles Times survey found dozens of local burger stands using some variation of "Tommy's" or "Thomas" in their name, hoping to borrow the association. The family has generally let most of that slide, reserving legal pushback specifically for anyone using "original" or "world famous" in their branding. That the founding Beverly and Rampart location still operates largely as it did in the 1940s — order at the window, eat standing up, chili dripping through a paper wrapper — while the brand around it has scaled into a regional chain, is part of what makes Tommy's a distinctly Los Angeles institution rather than just a nostalgic curiosity. Every one of the dozens of copycat "Tommy's" stands scattered across the city is, whether it admits it or not, still chasing what Koulax got right at that one intersection in 1946.
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About Original Tommy's
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