‘Seinfeld’ Writer Explains Why the ‘Soup Nazi’ Episode Was a ‘Documentary’

Seinfeld has featured a number of episodes centered around food — from “The Chinese Restaurant,” to “The Marble Rye,” to the wildly disturbing episode in which Newman fantasizes about cannibalizing a butter-drenched Kramer.

But the best of the bunch is clearly “The Soup Nazi.”

The story of a delicate culinary genius who only serves his knee-buckling soups to customers that follow strict ordering procedures was clearly too idiosyncratic to be fictional. TV audiences soon discovered what many New Yorkers already knew: the Soup Nazi was based on a real guy named Al Yeganeh. 

Yeganeh was well-known around the city, and was actually profiled by The New Yorker in 1989. Amazingly, his intense dislike of customers was evident even back then. “I tell you, I hate to work with the public. They treat me like a slave,” Yeganeh told the publication. “My philosophy is: The customer is always wrong, and I’m always right. I raised my prices to try to get rid of some of these people, but it didn’t work.”

The writer of the Seinfeld episode, Spike Feresten, recently appeared on The Rich Eisen Show, and revealed that the storyline was even more fact-based than most people realize. 

Feresten first encountered “the Soup Nazi” while working for David Letterman as a writer, regularly getting his lunches from Yeganeh’s soup stand. He wasn’t intending to write about this experience for Seinfeld until he had a meeting with Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David and pitched “10 ideas” but got “no laughs.” As Feresten was starting to get “a little flop sweaty,” David asked, “What else is going on in New York?”

“There’s this weird guy who sells soup they call the Soup Nazi,” Feresten responded, adding that “if you don’t order the soup right, he gives your money back and he takes the soup away.” Seinfeld and David liked the random anecdote more than any of the actual pitches, telling Feresten: “That’s your first episode.”

Feresten didn’t just draw inspiration from Yeganeh, some customers made it into the script, too. “Most of that episode (is) little vignettes of what happened to me in real life,” Feresten explained. “When Elaine says, ‘You kind of look like Al Pacino.’ There was a woman behind me, in front of me actually, who said that to him and didn’t get her soup.” 

But the real Soup Nazi was less network-friendly than his fictional stand-in. “He went, not like the TV character, ‘F-you, get the F out of here!’”

And Feresten himself is in the story, too: “I’m George in that very first scene with George and Jerry. I got yelled at, and I didn’t get the soup and they gave me my money back.”

Because so much was pulled from real life, Feresten views “The Soup Nazi” almost as a piece of nonfiction. “All of that is kind of real. I always say it’s more of a documentary than it is a piece of written comedy.”

Although, in real life, the “Soup Man” launched his own brand, instead of fleeing to Argentina.