In May 1946, Tom Kulax put nine hundred dollars into a tiny stand on the northeast corner of Beverly Boulevard and Rampart in Los Angeles. The building was a little red and white shack with a drawing of itself on the sign. He started selling hamburgers and hot dogs with his own thick, beanless chili ladled over the top. Nobody came running.
Kulax had failed twice before reaching that corner. Born in Oklahoma City in 1918 to Greek immigrants, he came west to California as a boy in a Model T Ford. During the war, he welded ships like thousands of young men drawn to Southern California for defense work. In those same years, he opened a hot dog stand on Florence Avenue in South Los Angeles.
It didn’t make it. He moved and tried again. That one didn’t last either. So he tried a third time, and this time the stand held on.
There wasn’t room inside to store anything, so the trunk of his car became the stockroom. The menu was short. Hamburgers, hot dogs, chili on just about everything. No French fries.
You got a bag of potato chips and drinks came in cans. What made it work was the chili, all beef cooked with flour mixed in, which is why it was so thick. It went on the burger the way gravy goes on a biscuit. Nobody seems to know exactly why he started putting it on hamburgers.
A San Francisco paper went looking for the reason in 2023 and came back with rumors but no answer. The company’s own history says the public was slow to discover the stand, and what finally turned it around was long hours, fast service, and a stubborn focus on quality. Kulax ran it tight because he had to. His whole idea, as a company representative described it decades later, was to feed people what they wanted in big portions at a reasonable price, at a good pace.
The math was plain. Food costs ran well above the industry standard, so the only way to make money was by selling a lot of burgers to a lot of people. By the middle of the 1950s, it was working. The stand had a reputation across Los Angeles, and people told the people they knew.
The company still calls Tommy’s the word-of-mouth hamburger. In the 1960s, the crowds got big enough that Kulax bought the rest of the northeast corner and opened a second serving counter right next to the original shack. The way you ate never changed. No tables, no chairs.
You walk up to the window, order, pay, and eat standing at a counter along the wall with a paper towel in your hand because Tommy’s never bothered with napkins. The grill is right in front of you, so you watch your burger go down on the flat top while you wait. You don’t wait long. In 1991, a reporter for the Los Angeles Business Journal stood in that line and wrote that newcomers couldn’t believe it.
You could order, pay, and have your food in your hands in fifteen seconds. About seventy-five people were bunched up around the shack on one ordinary lunch hour. College kids, out-of-towners, men in suits, day laborers. A young lawyer said the place gave white-collar guys like him a blue-collar feeling.
Another lawyer said he’d started coming at 2:00 in the morning back when he was in law school and had never really stopped. For students at UCLA, the late-night drive to the shack was a Tommy’s run, and going too long without one was a little like skipping a football game. A writer named Kevin Drum made his first one in 1976 as a freshman at Caltech. He ordered a chili burger, and when it came, it was drowning in chili, which didn’t appeal to him.
He ate it anyway. More than forty years later, he wrote that was the start of a long love affair. Kulax didn’t chase trends. He’d tried a healthier chicken sandwich at one outlet and dropped it.
When customers asked how much fat or cholesterol was in a Tommy’s burger, his general manager, Brent Mayer, said, “We tell them we don’t know. We sell an old-fashioned chili burger. ” Mayer, who came up through McDonald’s management training, said their food costs ran 38 percent of expenses. That’s high for a burger stand.
Other places could cut and cut and cut, Mayer said, but Kulax knew customers could taste the difference. “We don’t even weigh our burgers,” he added. Kulax did try to branch out. In the 1970s, he opened five more Tommy’s restaurants, and none ever drew a crowd like the original, though each did well on its own.
He also opened a sit-down Mexican restaurant across the street called Tomitos. It didn’t make it. When something sells that well for that cheap, people notice. The first person to notice wasn’t a stranger.
According to the 1991 profile, the first imitator was a business associate of Kulax’s, something of an insider. He opened his own place in West Los Angeles and the South Bay, and he called it Tommy’s, which sounds exactly like Tommy’s when you say it out loud. Kulax didn’t waste many words on him. “He was a nickel-and-dimer,” he told the reporter.
“And once one copy worked, others followed. ” Open the Los Angeles yellow pages that year and you’d find Tam’s Burgers, Tom’s Junior Burger, Tom’s Super Burgers, Tom’s Senior Burgers, and Tomy’s. They copied the meat chili, the beefsteak tomatoes, the cheese, the neon sign, the script lettering on the building, even the industrial paper towel racks. Some copied the prices.
Customers would call the office to complain about a burger they didn’t like or a price that seemed too high, and someone would have to explain that they hadn’t eaten at Tommy’s. They’d eaten at somebody pretending to be Tommy’s. Kulax did two things. First, the name.
His stands carried the full name, Tommy’s Original World Famous Hamburgers, and that whole phrase became the signal. If a place used all of it, you were at a real branch. The “World Famous” part wasn’t just bragging. A Swedish magazine once called Tommy’s the quintessential fast food of Los Angeles, and TV crews from Australia, Korea, Japan, and Taiwan came to film segments at the shack.
On the marquee, he put up a line that said exactly what he thought: “Tommy’s, many imitate, none compare. ” Second, he went to court. By the early 1990s, he said he’d filed twenty trademark lawsuits in just the three years since 1988, and he hadn’t lost one. “Copy the lettering, the name, or the shack,” he warned, “and you’ll get slapped with a suit.
” And then he said, “I sue them. ” But plenty of the copycats were still open, and not all of them were worried. Over on Pico Boulevard, there was a stand called Tom’s Number Five advertising the greatest chili burger in the world. Its co-owner, Henry Chung, said he wasn’t sure why the previous owner had picked that name.
He wasn’t even sure the previous owner was named Tom. Were they going to change it? “We don’t think about changing it,” he said. Kulax could have franchised and put a real Tommy’s on every one of those corners himself.
That’s exactly what the man with the hot dog cart a mile down Florence Avenue did. Carl’s Jr. sold franchises and spread far beyond Los Angeles. People kept asking Kulax to do the same.
His headquarters was getting about two calls a week from people who wanted to buy a Tommy’s franchise. The Business Journal said the idea was anathema to him. He preferred to grow at his own pace, one restaurant at a time. Decades later, a company representative put it more simply: “Tom never wanted to do it.
” And that’s how a chili burger stand ended up with one of the most crowded family trees in Los Angeles. Kulax wouldn’t franchise Tommy’s, so the city franchised it for him without asking and without his recipe. At that point, he had sixteen restaurants besides the shack, 325 employees, and nearly twenty million dollars a year in sales. All of it from nine hundred dollars and a corner that took years to catch on.
He was in his seventies and sounded like a man who knew exactly what he’d pulled off. “If I had to start over, I couldn’t do it now,” he said. “But I’ve accomplished what I wanted. ” Kulax died on May 28, 1992, at seventy-three.
Eleven years after the founder died, in June 2003, the company that owns Tommy’s filed an application with the United States Patent and Trademark Office for the mark “Tommy’s Original World Famous Hamburgers,” the full name the company said it had been using since 1978. A federal mark would have protected it nationwide. The government said no. The examiners issued a final refusal on July 14, 2004.
When the Los Angeles Times looked into it fifteen years later, a trademark lawyer who went through the federal records said the reason was another trademark already on the books. A federal registration from 1985 for a restaurant name with the words “Tommy’s World Famous Hamburgers Since 1967,” spelled T-O-M-M-Y-S. That registration claims use since 1967, which is twenty-one years after Kulax opened his stand. Lawyers told the Times that suing any one of the lookalikes would mean proving the copying was deliberate, and a legal battle to become the only Tommy’s in Los Angeles would cost too much money.
One of them said, “Part of the Tommy’s story is that there are so many ripoffs. ” So the family made a decision. According to the Times, the founder’s stepson, Bob Oerbach, said the family chose on purpose not to keep chasing the imitators in court. When the paper went looking for those copies in 2019, it found 67 of them in and around Los Angeles County, more than twice as many copies as there were real Tommy’s.
What the family did instead was teach the customers. The logo on every real Tommy’s is a drawing of the original stand at Beverly and Rampart. The company tells people to look for the shack. They even turned it into a rhyme: “If you don’t see the shack, take it back.
” From then on, the family’s answer to every copy was the building itself. There was one more fight, and it was the hardest one because it was inside the family. In 2008, the founder’s son, Tommy Kulax Jr. , started selling chili online under the name Tommy’s Original Chili Factory.
The family company sent him a cease-and-desist letter on Christmas Eve. He changed the name and moved to Las Vegas. In 2009, the company sued him in federal court. A claim that he’d taken the chili recipe was dropped because the recipes turned out to be different.
“I helped build that business with my dad,” he told the Business Journal. The two sides sat down for settlement talks in the spring of 2010. The exact ending remains unclear. Through all of it, the window at Beverly and Rampart stayed open.
Tommy’s did grow, but only on its own terms, and that meant slowly. In January 2008, it opened its first restaurant outside California in Henderson, Nevada, and then another in Las Vegas less than a year later. Growing slowly had a cost, though. In Santa Monica, a Tommy’s had been sitting at Lincoln and Pico Boulevards since 1994, around the corner from Santa Monica High School.
It was the only Tommy’s on the whole west side, and high school kids had hung out there after class for years. Then the landlord said he was interested in bringing in a Starbucks. Santa Monica already had eighteen of them. In February 2014, Tommy’s was on a month-to-month lease, waiting to find out how long it had left.
The general manager talking to the local paper was the same man who’d talked to the Business Journal twenty-three years earlier. It was Mayer again. “You know how that is,” he said, “when you go up against a national chain. ” Later that year, the Starbucks moved in.
The last Tommy’s in San Diego went the same way in March 2023 after it couldn’t come to terms on its lease. That left 32. The hard years after that hit Tommy’s the way they hit everybody. When the pandemic closed dining rooms, the company says Tommy’s actually did well because most of its newer stores have drive-throughs and people stayed in their cars.
Costs were another story. In a 2025 interview, a company representative said California’s twenty-dollar minimum wage for fast food workers had changed the math and that the price of beef had gone up astronomically. What kept the lines moving was the same thing as always. The burgers still go down raw on a five-foot grill when you order them, and they’re in your hands in about three minutes.
The company even runs trucks now that bring the shack to birthday parties, schools, and movie sets. And every hard year brought the old question back. In 2023, Oerbach told that San Francisco paper there had been talk of franchising, but “my dad did not franchise for a reason. ” Two years later, a company representative said they were “real close.
” As of this year, the company is still family-owned, and no sign that a single franchise has been sold. The family kept guarding the recipe. “We are chili,” the representative said. “Without our chili, we are nothing.
” At the original corner, the chili is still made every day by a two-man team in a pair of hundred-gallon steam kettles. On a to-go order, it drips right through the wrapper. Every few years, Tommy’s throws itself a birthday, and the price of the burger matches the age of the shack. On its 60th birthday in 2006, the original stand sold 60-cent Tommy burgers.
On its 70th, 70 cents. On May 15, 2026, eighty years to the day after Kulax opened the window, a chili cheeseburger at every Tommy’s in California and Nevada cost 80 cents. The regular price was $5. 50.
Limit three per person, noon to 8. At the original corner, the Belmont High School marching band played, and a local assemblyman brought a state resolution honoring eighty years of business. The crowds came and kept coming until 8:00. The people running the place that day had been there most of their lives.
The chief executive, Donna Bernal, started working at Tommy’s when she was twelve years old. Victor Kulax, the founder’s grandson, has worked there for thirty-seven years. The founder’s youngest daughter, Cynthia Kulax, spent the day greeting customers at her father’s first stand. “It’s a wonderful legacy,” she said, “that my father left behind.
”
The 67 copies took nearly everything else. They took the name, give or take a letter. They took the neon and the script lettering. They took the chili burger, the beefsteak tomatoes, the paper towels, and the prices.
Some of them are still open tonight. What they couldn’t take was the shack or the family still running it. That drawing on every real Tommy’s sign is a picture of one specific building on one specific corner, and you can drive to it. The red and white stand Kulax bought for nine hundred dollars is still sitting at Beverly and Rampart, open all night.
The grill is going, and there’s a line of people standing at the counter with paper towels in their hands, exactly where the drawing says it’ll be.