Connecticut is a small state so we had just one stop, Louis Lunch in New Haven. In 1900 Louis Lassen invented the hamburger in this extremely small restaurant by broiling a ground beef patty and putting it between two slices of toast. They still serve this original hamburger made the exact same way, even using the same boiler today. The restaurant is tiny, almost claustrophobic, able to sit maybe 10 people at most and it is run by the grandson of Louis Lassen.
The burger or perhaps, proto-burger can be had plain or with cheese, lettuce and tomato but never with ketchup. It tastes exactly as one would expect a lightly seasoned broiled burger patty in between toast would taste, quite plain. It is certainly not as delicious as a modern, evolved burger with custom hamburger buns, all kinds of sauces and an incredible variety of toppings such as onion rings, mushrooms, pastrami, exotic cheese, etc. However this plain burger had a taste that cannot be found in other burgers, the taste of history. The Wright Brother’s first airplane is inferior in every way to a modern airplane but it would be really cool to take a flight in it and we can’t expect it to as nice as a Boeing 787. We can’t fly in the original airplane but at Louis Lunch anyone can try an original hamburger, made the same way as the first one for $8.
After stopping at Louis Lunch we drove a bit more, stopping by a rest stop that had a free RV dump before finding a Walmart in New Jersey for the evening.
The next day we went to Roseland, New Jersey to visit my Aunt, who lived in a huge house with my cousin. They had a nice parking space in their driveway for us and took us to lunch at a nearby Japanese sushi buffet restaurant which was quite good. We hung out with everyone until dinner when they took us out to a Chinese restaurant where they treated us to a huge seafood meal featuring an enormous live King Crab that weighed over 11 pounds! The crab was so big that it had to be served in three dishes.
