09/26/2026
A hamburger restaurant in San Antonio helped pay for a tiny metal tube that holds open a blocked artery.
Phil Romano opened the first Fuddruckers in 1979, inside an old San Antonio bank building he had gutted and made over into a restaurant. The idea took one breath to explain. Grind the beef on site, bake the buns on site, hand the customer his burger half finished and let him build the rest of it himself at a counter stacked with tomatoes and onions and pickles. People took to it immediately, and it spread out of San Antonio across Texas and then a good ways past it.
A few years into all of that, a doctor named Julio Palmaz came to the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio as chief of angiography. He had been turning an idea over with a colleague, Dr. Richard Schatz: a small expandable metal sleeve that could be threaded into a clogged artery and opened from the inside, so the vessel would stay open after the doctors were done. It was a fine idea on paper. What it did not have was money.
Romano put in two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for a stake in it. He was not a doctor and he never once pretended to be one. Palmaz invented the thing and Schatz helped develop it, and the burger man wrote the check that let them find out whether it would work. It worked. The royalties that came back to Romano over the years ran into the millions, and of everything he ever put money behind, that is the one that turned out to matter most.
Romano went on to start better than twenty more restaurant ideas out of Texas, Macaroni Grill and eatZi's among them. But the one that says the most about his nerve never appeared on a menu anywhere. There is no Fuddruckers in San Antonio today, and the old bank where the whole thing began stopped being a burger joint a long time ago. Eight of the restaurants are still running elsewhere in Texas. The rest of what that money bought is inside people's chests, quietly doing its job, and almost nobody carrying one has any idea where the seed money came from.
