A $38 Sandwich Is Stealing the Show at the U.S. Open

Nobody goes to the U.S. Open for the food. This year, a lot of people are.

It's a French dip: Pat LaFrieda prime rib, scored and slow-cooked, piled with caramelized onions and provolone on a baguette, horseradish aioli on the side, a cup of housemade jus for dipping. It costs $38. It's made by Salt Hank's, and this year is the first time the stand has set up inside the tournament grounds — and it's reportedly become the thing people are talking about as much as the tennis.

Henry Laporte — known online as Salt Hank — has no formal culinary training. He built an audience during the pandemic posting indulgent cooking videos, the kind built for scrolling, not a tasting menu. That following turned into brand deals, a cookbook, and eventually a real restaurant: Salt Hank's, opened in Manhattan's West Village in 2025 with chef Daniel Rubenfeld, built around this one sandwich. It drew lines down Bleecker Street fast enough to help push Laporte's social following into the millions.

The West Village shop makes around 300 of these sandwiches a day, five days a week. At the U.S. Open, the team is making 1,500 a day, seven days a week — five times the daily volume, every day of the tournament, no days off. That's not a pop-up doing a few hundred for a novelty moment; that's a food-service operation running at restaurant-chain scale for two weeks straight.

In August, Wonder — a food-delivery platform that lets customers order from multiple restaurant brands in one place — acquired Salt Hank's outright. The U.S. Open run isn't a side project for a guy who went viral once; it's a real test of whether an internet-built food brand can actually operate at large-event scale, under new ownership, with real money behind it.

The U.S. Open runs through the men's final on September 13. What happens to the sandwich's line lengths — and Salt Hank's next move under Wonder — after the tournament ends is the more interesting question than anything happening on Arthur Ashe.