Peter Luger Steakhouse

When “Carl Luger’s Café, Billiards and Bowling Alley” was opened in 1887, the restaurant quickly became a neighbourhood favourite in predominantly German Williamsburg. Peter Luger owned the establishment, while his nephew, Carl, manned the kitchen.

Luger’s was not the only thing doing in the small Brooklyn neighbourhood. With the opening of the Williamsburg Bridge in December of 1903, Manhattan became far more accessible and a new crowd of businessmen crossed the East River. It was not until 1920 that Sol Forman, a seventeen-year-old who had dropped out of high school to work full-time lighting street lamps, established Forman Family with his siblings just across the street from Carl Luger’s.

Forman Family made everything from silverware to trays to stamped-metal giftware. The manufacturing site, at 185 Broadway, served as a headquarters for sales, and what better place for Sol Forman to take prospective clients than the famed restaurant just across the street? Sol was known to eat two steaks a day – three when the trade shows came through.