Le Tub, Hollywood’s kitschy hamburger dive, turns 50 with big weekend bash

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.

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.

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 There are still 2,000 “artifacts” at Le Tub, but some toilets have been replaced by clawfoot tubs, a bougie alternative to the cracked bowls and driftwood signs of yesteryear.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 Serafinis also want you to know that Le Tub’s existence in 2025 is a miracle. It wasn’t built to last this long, and wasn’t even supposed to be a restaurant — if not for the signature handheld that cemented the saloon’s spot in South Florida history.

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.”

Le Tub also owes its improbable lifespan, the Serafinis say, to an ornery owner who wanted a dive bar to match his grungy personality — until customers turned that bar, against its will, into an iconic destination.

“Without him, you’d never have a place like Le Tub,” Dan Serafini says. “It’s a pretty unique down-and-dirty style of bar. He birthed this strange, crazy place and created a whole culture around him.”

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 health spa and even played a frogman in the 1965 James Bond film “Thunderball.”

Trouble plagued Kohuth throughout the 1960s. Sun-Tattler archives say he got shot while trying to twist with someone else’s girlfriend at the beach; drove a boat that wound up decapitating a police officer; while driving a scooter injured a boy whose family later sued him; and hauled up treasure from a Spanish shipwreck off Fort Lauderdale’s coast, including a barnacle-covered anchor. (Kohuth never revealed the shipwreck’s location.)

During morning jogs on the beach, so the legend goes, Kohuth would go beachcombing for toilet seats, sinks, tubs and old driftwood. In 1974, he bought a Sunoco gas station on State Road A1A in Hollywood that he converted into a divey beach shack adorned with his porcelain finds.

“If that’s not peak Florida, I don’t know what is,” Taylor says. “I doubt Russell had any idea his quirky little waterfront joint would still be going strong long after his passing.”

In 1995, Kohuth retired and moved to Palatka, gifting Le Tub to longtime employee Steve Sidle and his wife, Robin. He died in 2010 at age 75, and the Sidles kept running it until the Serafinis bought the building and land in 2022.

No one can say exactly how the name “Le Tub” was born— although locals love speculating. Taylor thought Kohuth wanted a cheeky, quasi-sophisticated name for a “place that proudly didn’t try to be fancy.” In a Venice magazine article, former manager Brian Thompson suspected it was a nod to Québécois snowbirds who visited the beachside community.

Hagerman, the longtime line cook, said coworkers told him Kohuth struggled to find a name until he told beach lifeguards that his new dive bar “was going to be a real s—hole.”

“When he told them that, his friends decided to drop off some toilets,” Hagerman says. “The toilets were just his friends making fun of him, but Russell just made them part of the scenery and the name.”

“I still get phone calls from people asking to donate old toilets,” he adds. “They’re like, ‘Do you guys need one?’ and I’m like, ‘No, no, we’re still pretty good here.’”

Le Tub has no plans to honor Kohuth during its 50th anniversary, but his stories are emblematic of the restaurant’s weird history, Dan Serafini says. Employees still repeat Kohuth’s larger-than-life exploits to curious customers wanting explanations for the toilet planters, as if his lone-wolf persona somehow explained the penchant for potty furnishings.

Whether the stories are true is beside the point, he says. “No one really knows what’s true anymore because Russell was always so private.”

‘Dragged kicking and screaming into its future’

Most locals and longtime employees agree that Le Tub’s life is split into two eras: pre-Oprah and post-Oprah.

Pre-Oprah, Le Tub branded itself a cash-only dive bar that happened to serve burgers. Didn’t like waiting for food? “Staff members would mirror Russell’s attitude and proudly tell you, ‘Go down the street and eat somewhere else,’ ” Dan Serafini says.

Post-Oprah, Le Tub had to be “dragged kicking and screaming into its future,” Hagerman recalls.

In 2006, GQ writer Alan Richman cheered the cash-only “dream of a dump” and its “magnificent” sirloin patty in his roundup of top hamburgers in the country, adding, “I’m surprised anybody who eats here qualifies for a credit card.” Such heartwarming praise inspired Oprah’s BFF Gayle King to retrace Richman’s culinary quest — and that same year King and Oprah shouted out the burger’s supremacy on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”

Thousands made pilgrimages to Le Tub to try the Oprah-blessed burger, often overwhelming bartenders. After that, the typical experience of ordering a burger became a culinary free-for-all. Patrons sat themselves at the bar or shuffled into wooden booths on the open-air patio, framed in blue and pink toilet planters. Burger wait times stretched 90 minutes to two hours, prompting clashes with stressed-out servers. Those who ordered water were handed clear plastic cups and directed to fill them at the infamous orange sports cooler on the uneven wooden deck. Palmetto bugs occasionally scuttled around, chasing the entrees.

“Once Le Tub got famous, everyone went for the hamburger,” says Hagerman, who joined in 2010. “It just overwhelmed the old system. Our place was in no way set up to handle that much traffic. There was no place to put 600 hamburgers, let alone cook them all in a day.”

Hagerman blamed Le Tub’s infamous wait times on the tiny kitchen — an 8-by-8-foot cubbyhole — and on the chargrill itself, only equipped to handle 30 patties at once. The extra pressure of making sides and salads backed up everyone’s orders, he explains.

“It’s not that it took 90 minutes to cook your hamburger,” he explains. “It takes 20, but you’ve got 100 customers ahead of you, and I can only make so many.”

When the Serafinis took over in November 2022, they gave Le Tub a long-overdue scrub. They repaved parking lots, replaced the crumbling dock and rebuilt its seawall taller. They hired a second line cook and installed a cold-prep station to handle sides and salads, drastically reducing burger wait times, says the couple’s son, general manager Alex Serafini. They added cocktails, lobster BLTs and grilled salmon with soy-chili glaze.

But they refuse to polish up Le Tub too much. That would disrupt its nostalgic charm. Take, for example, Le Tub’s working fireplace, a relic that has no business in sweltering South Florida. Before the Serafinis lock up the old gas-station doors at night, if the weather’s cool enough, they light a match.

“If you’re sitting at the bar having a rumrunner and you’ve got a burger on the way, with a view of the water with a fireplace crackling next to you, I highly recommend that for you,” Alex Serafini says. “It was a Russell thing, for sure. But it’s here and it works.”

IF YOU GO

WHAT: Le Tub 50 Years Celebration

WHEN: May 30-June 1

WHERE: Le Tub, 1100 N. Ocean Drive, Hollywood

DETAILS: Free appetizer per table; prizes and giveaways; live music including DJ Zutra, Tito C, Lane Braden, and the Eric Xarles Band

INFORMATION: 954-921-9425; Le-Tub.com

Originally Published: May 29, 2025 at 1:00 PM EDT