After a stint spent flipping burgers (or, at least, overseeing their flipping), Reed turned his attentions to the ice cream business, spending the next 15 years building Bruster’s Real Ice Cream into the 200-unit company it is today. Then he did something few ever do—returned to his roots. In Reed’s case that meant burgers and carhops and his family business, Jerry’s Curb Service.

Today his Jerry’s Curb Service stands poised to march from one unit with two more under construction, as of press time, to as many as eight new restaurants over the next 12 months.

“We’re going from Maryland to Georgia, kind of the central East Coast over to Tennessee,” promises Reed. But “ultimately,” he says, “it will be a nationwide concept. We’re going to go slow and do it right.”

And doing it right means employing what Reed believes is his ace in hole. To make his 1950s-styled concept attractive to would-be franchisees, Reed is employing a decidedly twenty-first century tool—a Palm Pilot. “We started with the handheld technology a year ago,” he explains, “and now the carhops take an order, zap it to the kitchen, then go on to the next car.”

As a result, Jerry’s Curb Service is sending out fresh-cooked meals in six minutes where it once took 15. “It’s the handheld technology,” he asserts, “that really makes us franchisable.”

Franchising was not something Reed’s father, the Jerry of Jerry’s Curb Service, ever considered when he returned to Oklahoma after a stint in the Air Force and started Jerry’s Curb Service in 1947. “There were quite a few drive-ins back then,” Reed says, “and when he got out of the Air Force, he decided to open one in his home town.”

The restaurant held its own almost from the beginning, helped in part, according to Reed, by Jerry’s 1967 invention of the steak salad.

“Dad used to sell steak sandwiches,” Reed recalls, “and one day a friend who was trying to lose weight asked him to chop up a steak and serve it with no bun. He also ordered a salad. Dad, as a joke, just chopped up the steak and put it on top of the salad. People liked it and started ordering it, and it went big time.”

Even today, according to Reed, in addition to the usual fare of hamburgers, fresh-cut French fries, milk shakes, and vanilla cokes, about 37 percent of the drive-in’s sales come from salads. “I don’t know why,” Reed says, “people just like ’em.”

Reed took over Jerry’s in the early ’70s after a disagreement between father and son over business strategies ended with Jerry bowing out. “We were two different types of business people,” Reed explains. “Dad was a really great guy, and he gave everything away. If you wore a uniform, for instance, you ate for free. I didn’t think it was run like a business, so I told him it was either him or me. He said to go ahead and take it over.”

“I think Bruster’s increased traffic,” he says. “You’re standing there with an ice cream cone smelling fresh French fries from next door, or vice versa: I think they played off each other really well.”

After turning the day-to-day operation of Jerry’s over to an associate, he spent the next several years building Bruster’s into a 200-store chain. “That’s how I learned franchising,” Reed says. With 65 Bruster’s under construction and another 165 in the planning stages, Reed is ready to turn his attention to remaking the drive-in of his youth. Two new stores are already under construction in Spartanburg, South Carolina and Glen Burney, Maryland. Each is expected to open in early 2005. After that, according to Reed, the sky is the limit.

“Our model is Sonic,” he says, “and they have 2,800 units.” All that without even Palm Pilots.

“We have over 1,200 franchise applications to date without any advertising,” says Yeganeh, whose menu includes crab bisque, spicy Mexican chili, gazpacho, cucumber, and Vichyssoise at prices of up to $30 a quart. Finally succumbing to years of pressure from fans, the famous soup chef—in partnership with William Ciaramello of International Gourmet Soups—says he expects to open 1,000 franchise units in the next 5–7 years under the moniker of the Original SoupMan. He also intends to sell them in Grab-n-Go refrigerated packages in the gourmet daily sections of quality grocery stores and supermarkets.

“We will concentrate on the major cities, regional shopping malls, airports and tourist attractions,” Yeganeh says. “The qualities of my soups are the key to my concept.”

Those qualities were attracting long lines to his New York City soup kitchen even before it—and he—were made famous by the November 10, 1994 episode of Seinfeld. In that episode, the Soup Nazi makes the best soup in New York despite his sour demeanor and stern reprimands of customers who don’t follow his rules. If the Soup Nazi didn’t like the way a would-be consumer presented himself at the soup counter, he would yell “No soup for you. Next!” In the end, a triumphant Elaine—who’d been banned from the store—drives the Soup Nazi into exile in Argentina by threatening to publish a hand-written list of secret recipes she’d discovered in a piece of furniture he’d once owned.

The episode not only became an instant classic and one of the most popular Seinfeld episodes ever aired, it also inspired a whole cult of comedy sharing the punch line of “No soup for you!”

One observer who was decidedly not amused, however, was Yeganeh, who took great offense and threatened to sue. When Seinfeld himself later came to the kitchen to apologize, the soup maestro reportedly cussed him out. And upon hearing that the show was ending in 1998, he agreed to appear on David Letterman “to celebrate,” he said, “this clown going off the air…” Earlier, Yeganeh had told People Weekly that Seinfeld’s disappearance from the air waves “was the best gift America and the human race got this Christmas. The show really destroyed my personal life and my emotional and physical well-being. Because of this show, customers think I’m going to kill them, and they panic.”

In a subsequent interview with QSR, Yeganeh added some detail regarding the type of person he seeks. “I need franchisees that are passionate, educated, and dedicated to being number one, too,” he said of the investors who will each pay $30,000 plus 5 percent of their annual gross sales for the privilege of selling his soup. “They must be serious about owning a business and not cutting corners.”

Oh, and just one other caveat.

“We must do it right,” he insists, “and follow the rules.”