09/29/2026
Come see us for a real New Orleans PoBoy!
The most famous sandwich in Louisiana got its name because two brothers decided to feed a picket line for free. 🥖
In the summer of 1929, the streetcar men of New Orleans went on strike. It turned ugly fast. Cars were burned. The city took sides, and most of the city took the strikers' side, which is why a great many people simply walked to work for months rather than ride.
Bennie and Clovis Martin had been streetcar conductors themselves before they opened a coffee stand on St. Claude Avenue. When the strike began, they wrote to the union and said plainly that any striking carman who came to their counter would be fed, and that they would stand with the men no matter how bad it got.
They meant it. They fed them for the length of the strike, out of their own pockets, day after day.
What they served was a long loaf of French bread split and filled, because it was cheap, it was filling, and it could be cut to whatever size a man needed. The story that came down through the family is that whenever a striker walked through the door, somebody behind the counter would say, here comes another poor boy.
The name stuck to the sandwich.
There is a practical piece to this too. The traditional French loaf tapered at both ends, which meant the sandwich went skinny and the ends were wasted. The Martins pushed their baker, Leidenheimer, to produce a loaf that ran the same width the whole way down. That loaf is the reason a New Orleans po-boy looks the way it does.
So the shape of the bread, the name of the sandwich and the crust you know all came out of one labor dispute.
Every po-boy you have ever eaten is a small monument to a strike you never heard of. 🥖
