The downtown landmark is handing out 500 cups of Dolores Chili

Today is Free Chili Day at Philippe’s. The iconic downtown sandwich shop is teaming up with Dolores Chili to give away 500 delicious cups (straight or add beans) at no charge with the purchase of a French Dip sandwich.  Vouchers available at the front door while they last.

Philippe’s owner Richard Binder serves the lunchtime crowd in 1986Credit: Michael Haering/ Herald Examiner Collection/Los Angeles Public Library

When (and if) Downtown’s Cole’s French Dip closes this weekend, their longtime rival, Philippe the Original, will become the oldest restaurant in the city of Los Angeles. French immigrant Philippe Mathieu opened the long-lived restaurant in 1908 and moved to multiple downtown locations before selling out to the present owners, the Martin and Binder families, who parked it at the brick landmark we know today in 1951.

The noonday lunch rush at Philippe’sCredit: Photo by Bobak Ha’Eri

Around that same time, Basilio Munoz started his Mexican food company, named for his wife, Dolores, in East Los Angeles. Dolores Canning Company has been churning out pickled pork, canned menudo and pork rinds next door to the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department compound ever since. In 1973, they added their famous frozen chili brick to the roster. “Grandpa started out distributing meat and canning menudo,” co-owner Bert Munoz told the Los Angeles Times. “But his baby project was to make chili that wasn’t canned.”     

You can order Dolores Chili at Philippe’s every day of the year, but every January since 2010, the two legendary family-run businesses join forces for the fun giveaway at Philippe’s. Dolores folks will be handing out free chili samples and giveaways. If you want to take home an entire brick, you’ll have to stop at Ralphs, Vons or Smart & Final.


Mary Lou Obregon behind the candy counter at Philippe’s in 1986Credit: Michael Haering/ Herald Examiner Collection/Los Angeles Public Library

“Philippe’s appears to be hewn from the very rock on which L.A. is built.,” Los Angeles restaurant critic Patric Kuh wrote in 2008. “The restaurant’s history isn’t what attracts us; the continuity is. Philippe’s is that rare marker with which we can measure time. To pause in the upstairs rooms is to understand what a hundred years in L.A. means.  Sitting at Philippe’s, you’re eating with Angelenos from other decades—the porters and the masons, the shopgirls with dreams who took the streetcar from Bullock’s. Like them, you have felt the need to get back to what has lasted in this city, and like them, you strengthen the bond between Philippe’s and Los Angeles when you enter its crowded halls and take your place in line.”

Scroll to continue reading