Plus, they’re perfect served up with a local beer. After all, they’re generally large and shareable, so you can enjoy them in the company of friends. After all, it’s National Pretzel Day, a date set aside to honor the deliciousness of a time-honored snack that it’s estimated Americans consume at a rate of about two pounds per year.Īlthough National Pretzel Day honors pretzels of all spots and stripes, including the crunchy kind, we’re partial to the Bavarian-style soft pretzels that are served (fittingly) at countless places around town. And that makes them a Pop Trash Museum delicacy.Every day there’s something to celebrate here in Milwaukee – and today, it’s the pretzel. But did they help make the soft pretzel a national phenomenon, inspire pizza pretzels and pretzels dipped in chocolate or strawberry sauce or nacho cheese? They certainly did, probably as good as or more than any other brand. Rest assured that Hot Sam belongs up there with the Blockbusters, Kinney Shoes, Borders, Tower Records, Gadzooks and other loved brands of the second half of the 20th century who have disappeared.ĭid Hot Sam invent the soft pretzel? No, most certainly not. (We’re not only treated to a Hot Sam replica in this season of Stranger Things, but there’s a Chess King, a Jazzercise, and even a Wicks ’N Sticks-where in the 1980s you could buy “money candles,” candles that would burn and burn until they melted all the way down and would reveal either a $1 bill or, if you were lucky, a $20 bill.) Fields, and mostly deprioritized in favor of another pretzel chain purchased by the queen of cookies-Pretzel Time.Įvery now and again, Hot Sam reemerges via some random pop culture reference, like in Season 3 of Stranger Things where a 1980s mall proves to be a pivotal plot location. Ten years later the chain would be sold to Mrs. In 1985 there were over 175 Hot Sam stores around the country, raking in $30-$50 million. But as fast as Hot Sam took over the nation’s shopping mall scene, they left the American consciousness almost as quickly. Hot Sam filled that food void of quick snacks that made a whole entire wing of most malls smell like salty heaven. York Steakhouse? Hot Dog on a Stick? Or perhaps a department store that had an actual diner in it? (For my hometown mall it was a Kaufmann’s, RIP, and I remember they had the best orange sherbet at their department store restaurant called Tic Toc.) Oh sure there was possibly a McDonald’s, but most malls maybe had 3-5 restaurants tops.
Prior to the mall food court explosion in the late 80s / early 90s that saw basically every mall adopt a Sbarro, a Chinese food place (already tempted to go get honey bourbon chicken after this article publishes), or a Taco Bell, food at the mall was kind of an afterthought. “They’re finding that the pretzel fills them up without slowing them down when they’re shopping,” said Deborah Price, who in 1985 managed the Hot Sam store in the Mission Viejo mall. Why were they so popular? Well, as the LA Times reported in 1985 when Hot Sam spread from its Midwest roots to conquer California, soft pretzels just made more sense as a snack for heaps of mall shoppers running around in their L.A.
But as America’s love of shopping malls exploded from the 1960s - 1980s, soft pretzels went from carts on the streets to kiosks and storefronts in almost every indoor mall in America. Soft pretzels were once the denizen of street vendors only.
Can you imagine anyone waiting 16 minutes for a soft pretzel today? People would be rage tweeting their first world inconvenience left and right!īut I like to think Hot Sam just hit at the right time and place, like all good and magical things. But the stores themselves “baked” the pretzels in ovens that had rotating drums and took around 16 minutes to properly make a pretzel. What made Hot Sam so good? Was it the recipe? It was no hot secret the pretzels were factory pre-made, flash-frozen, and shipped to all their stores. The first store was at the Livonia Mall in Michigan (one of the first indoor shopping malls in the state) in 1967, occupying real estate alongside latter-half 20th century mall staples like Children’s Palace, Sears, and General Cinema. You’ll get a decent pretzel and that sweet, buttery smell that envelops you and adds at least 5 pounds to your hips.īut Hot Sam is the OG-the pretzel company that ran so that these newer brands could fly. Today you can visit an Auntie Anne’s, a Wetzel’s Pretzel, a Philly Pretzel Factory, or a Pretzelmaker. And sure enough there was no soft pretzel like a Hot Sam soft pretzel.
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