No soup for you!

The Soup Nazi is probably my favorite episode of Seinfeld. Anyone who has ever worked in any kind of customer service position will tell you that we secretly dream of telling difficult customers: "No [fill in your respective service] for you!" I didn't realize that this character is based on a real guy! I was just reading Alex Prud'homme's 1989 essay "Slave" from Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink thinking, "this guy sounds a lot like the Soup Nazi." Sure enough, Albert Yeganeh, the chef of New York's Soup Kitchen International, is the inspiration for this infamous character. Prud'homme describes a visit to the Soup Kitchen just as we see it on Seinfeld: a line of people out the door and down the block; have your order and money ready; no talking; place your order and move to the left; those who behave may get a side of bread. Yeganeh tells Prud'homme: "I tell you, I hate to work with the public. They treat me like a slave. My philosophy is: the customer is always wrong and I'm always right. I raised my prices to try to get rid of some of these people, but it didn't work." That must be some good soup.