All it took was one botched soup order to change TV history.
Back in the early ’90s, a young TV writer named Spike Feresten was grabbing lunch at a then-legendary, line-around-the-block soup stand in midtown Manhattan — until he broke the unwritten rules and was promptly turned away. No soup for him.
A few years later — on Nov. 2, 1995, exactly 30 years ago this week — Feresten turned that humiliating lunchtime rejection into an iconic Seinfeld moment, making “No soup for you” one of the most quoted lines in sitcom history. “The next morning, it was all over the New York media,” he tells THR. “It’s still the thing I’m known for. It’s always Soup Nazi.”
The real Soup Nazi was a notoriously cranky chef named Al Yeganeh, who would refuse service to anyone who committed any number of small infractions while in line for his famously tasty bisques. Despite berating customers, Yeganeh turned his soup stand into a local sensation, then a national brand — until it went bankrupt in 2017, and Yeganeh vanished amid unconfirmed rumors of his death. “I haven’t read any epitaphs,” says Feresten, who these days hosts the podcast Spike’s Car Radio. “I like to believe he’s out there somewhere, traveling the world, collecting recipes.” Meanwhile, Larry Thomas — who played the character on Seinfeld — rode a few minutes of screen time into an Emmy nomination and a lifetime of fan conventions.
Bonus Soup Nazi lore: Jerry himself once tried to visit in person. “He walked up, ordered, and the guy did a triple take — not a double take, a triple take,” Feresten says. Then the Soup Nazi exploded, yelling at Jerry in full view of the packed line, who “got the show of a lifetime.” Jerry eventually sent an assistant back in a town car to quietly retrieve the soup anyway. As Feresten notes, “No one tells Jerry ‘No soup for you.’ ”
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Also in Rambling Reporter:
South Park takes security threat seriously — A new guard is suddenly camped outside the often-offensive cartoon’s production offices in Marina del Rey — and it isn’t Cartman.
How Gwenyth Paltrow biographer Amy Odell — or, as the Goop founder refers to her, “this hack” — got a boost from being dissed.
This story appeared in the Nov. 5 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
