Two brothers, a recipe, and a taxi.
James Paschal was the entrepreneur — a boy who ran a shoeshine stand at thirteen and a store of his own by fifteen. Robert was the cook. In 1947 the brothers, raised in Thomson in McDuffie County, opened a small luncheonette at 837 West Hunter Street and called it Paschal Brothers Soda. At first it sold only cold sandwiches and bottled sodas.
When customers began asking for something hot, the brothers ran into a problem: the shop had no stove, and neither man owned a car. So Robert cooked at home, and lunch was carried across town by taxi. His fried chicken — a recipe still made the same way today — is what put the place on the map. The sandwich sold for fifty-two cents.
Demand outran the little counter within a year. By the late 1950s the brothers had moved to a far larger building on the same street — the road we now know as Martin Luther King Jr. Drive — with a full dining room, banquet halls, and, before long, a jazz lounge and a motor hotel. What began as a sandwich shop became one of the most important gathering places in the American South.
