Le Tub Saloon Celebrates 50 Years
Introduction to Le Tub
When Le Tub Saloon first opened on Christmas Eve 1975, toilet seats on the front lawn encouraged diners to “seat yourself.” Beside these sat dented license plates, rusty anchors and a driftwood sign discouraging any noisy kids, infants, hat wearers, and anyone under 22 from entering — a sign that stayed up until the city of Hollywood, a decade later, asked founder Russell Kohuth to take it down.
For as long as hungry birds have swooped from the saloon’s leafy branches to stalk diners’ steak fries, Le Tub, the kitschy-divey national treasure on Hollywood’s Intracoastal Waterway, has delighted and polarized locals with tacky decor and huge hamburgers.
The 13-ounce sirloin burger served at Le Tub restaurant in Hollywood, which will mark its 50th anniversary with a weekend music bash.
Upcoming Celebration
Now the waterfront eatery is turning 50 years old with a three-day celebration from May 30 to June 1, a milestone to be marked with food and drink specials, souvenir tees and live music on a waterfront barge.
Fort Lauderdale restaurateurs Dan and Lise-Anne Serafini (GG’s Waterfront Bar & Grill, Tiki Tiki), who bought Le Tub in late 2022, consider this event an overdue coming-out party. Their restaurant is awash in upgrades, from new tiki huts shading the waterfront docks to cleaned-up toilet decor in the garden.
Changes and Upgrades
The servers, they want you to know, are less sassy; the wait times less headache-inducing; the tacky toilet planters less ugly. There are still 2,000 “artifacts” at Le Tub, but some toilets have been replaced by clawfoot tubs, a bougie alternative to the cracked bowls and driftwood signs of yesteryear.
“A lot of people were turned off by the toilet [decor] — me, for example,” Lise-Anne Serafini says. “The tourists and the older ladies didn’t really get it. But we don’t want to stray too far, just make it more approachable for everyone. We basically roughed up the new stuff so it looks like nothing has changed.”
The Le Tub Burger
Le Tub’s namesake 13-ouncer embodies the classic burger: a beefy, juicy pincushion of a patty barely engineered to fit its Cusano’s kaiser roll. Its fresh ground sirloin is blended with a small amount of fatty chuck daily, accented with salt, pepper and powdered garlic, then tossed on the chargrill for a minimum of 15 minutes or until desired doneness.
To this day, customers still can’t reconcile its simplicity with its popularity, says line cook Chris Hagerman, who’s crafted almost every one for 15 years.
“People always ask, ‘Did you put tomato juice in it or something?’, and it’s like, no, man, just salt and pepper,” Hagerman says. “There’s no secret. Everything’s fresh and blended that day.”
Russell T. Kohuth, ‘Renaissance Man’
No Le Tub history is complete without invoking Russell T. Kohuth, a scooter shop-owning bodybuilder whose life before opening Le Tub was marked by a string of bizarre incidents.
Born in Altoona, Pennsylvania, in 1935, Kohuth earned a bachelor of science degree from Penn State University in 1957 and afterward moved to South Florida.
Here, he became a “renaissance man,” says Clive Taylor, president of the Hollywood Historical Society.
A 1962 Hollywood Sun-Tattler article called out Kohuth’s “slightly convincing” portrayal as a boxer at the old Hollywood Playhouse. He ran a business flying ad banners over the beach, opened a healt
