Sylvana Okde grew up eating at Houston’s Antone’s, where the cold po’ boys are iconic sandwiches.

Filled with meat, cheese, sweet pickles and “chowchow” cabbage relish, they’re in the city’s food DNA, the Shipley Do-Nuts of sandwiches. Okde knew Antone’s as her family’s store, the chain where her father, Tony Okde, started as a cashier in 1976 before rising up the ranks and opening his own franchises. Until this year, her family ran two of the surviving Antone’s stores — one on Kirby, the other on Bellaire.

That ended in April, when the Okdes’ license with Legacy Restaurant Group expired. Legacy owns the Antone’s trademark and had decided it was “time to end” an agreement allowing the Okdes to share the name, Legacy CEO Jonathan Horowitz said.

The Okdes’ reactions ranged from sad to angry, though they were reluctant to say much for fear of retaliation. “We don’t want to get in a lawsuit,” Sylvana said. “It’s just not a battle we are going to fight.”

The story of how the Okdes partnered with Legacy, only to lose the Antone’s name, is a decades-long saga filled with lawsuits, head-spinning ownership changes and a family feud.

The Antone’s name

Jalal Antone created Antone’s in the 1960s. After he died, his widow and daughters fought in court for decades over the brand. They even stopped speaking to each other.

The Okdes aren’t related to the Antone family, but Tony worked at Antone’s for years and was on the company’s board of directors.

Antone’s has been named in more than a dozen lawsuits since 1978, according to Harris County court records. Some were run-of-the-mill business disputes, like injuries and payment disagreements. But there was also a multicase fight between Antone’s wife and daughters over who could sell Antone’s sandwiches and where. When the battles finally ended in the early 2000s, the original Antone’s company was on its way out, the daughters’ franchise had gone bankrupt, and Legacy owned the trademark for the famous Houston sandwich.

To make things even more confusing, the Okdes still had their own franchise deal with the original Antone’s company dating to the 1990s. The deal was transferred to Legacy after Legacy bought the trademarks. That’s how the Okdes ended up licensing the Antone’s name from Legacy — and how Legacy was able to finally boot them in April.

Legacy demanded overhauls of the Okdes’ labels and websites, banning any reference to Antone’s. It told Tony he couldn’t call his store Tony’s because the name was too similar.

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Some Okde family members thought Legacy was trying to take away a brand they had helped build. They said Tony invented some of the iconic Antone’s recipes, including the smoked turkey sandwich, the roast beef sandwich and the sweet pickles. (In an emailed statement, Legacy said it “is not aware of any recipes that Tony Okde may have created, and if there are any, we are not using them at this time.”)

This time, though, there are no court fights. All sides — including the Okdes’ lawyer, Deborah Taylor — agree that Legacy has full legal rights to the name.

“It really comes down to the licensing agreement,” Horowitz said. “The contract that we had with them said that when the license agreement ends, they have to change their name and their brand. That was part of the contract.”

The beginning

Houston has been eating Antone’s sandwiches since 1962, when Antone, the son of Lebanese immigrants, started serving sandwiches at a store on Taft near the Fourth Ward. “The Original” sandwich — with ham, salami, provolone, sweet pickles and chowchow — was a hit.

The Taft store stocked cheeses, olives, eels and “squid pickled in their own ink,” according to a 1965 Houston Chronicle article. But besides old newspaper clips, it’s hard to find facts on the Antone brand’s early history — a reality acknowledged by Legacy, which also owns Ninfa’s, another landmark Houston restaurant.

“We’ve got a ton of stuff on Ninfa’s. All kinds of recipes and menus and old photos,” Horowitz said. “We’ve got almost nothing on Antone’s and the history. I don’t know why.”

Antone’s sandwiches were so popular that they spawned an entirely new genre of sandwich: the Houston-style po’ boy, a Middle East-tinged version of the New Orleans classic, always served cold with plenty of mayo and chowchow. Robb Walsh, a local food writer, argues Antone started an only-in-Houston trend.

Antone signaled to other Middle Eastern restaurants that “if you called your place a poor boy shop and put some chowchow on your sandwiches, you could also offer falafels or kebabs or anything else you wanted,” Walsh wrote in the Houston Press in 2008.

Antone’s menu gradually expanded to include other sandwiches, including smoked turkey, chicken salad and the Piggy (think ham salad.) Legacy said via email it was not sure when each sandwich flavor started but said they were for sale “by 1970 or so.”

As the menu grew, so did Antone’s. The second location opened in 1967, on Main near Old Spanish Trail. A third location, which opened the following year at San Felipe and Voss, reportedly included a wine cellar.

At its peak, in the 1990s and early 2000s, Antone’s sandwiches were in grocery stores and in Exxon “Tiger Marts” as far away as Nashville, Tenn. There were as many as 15 Antone’s stores in Houston.

After all the legal fights — and, more recently, the name changes — Antone’s is down to just two storefronts, one near the Galleria and one off the North Loop, as well as two “grab-and-go kiosks,” including one in the downtown tunnel system, all run by Legacy. The sandwiches are also still in grocery stores. The original store, on Taft, closed in 2003.

Jalal Antone died in 1974. He left 98 percent of the company to his wife, Josephine, who had helped run the shops. The remaining 2 percent went to his daughters, Mary Jo and Jamie Lee.

The sisters later started a business — J.J. Gregory Gourmet Services — and took out a license from the original Antone’s company run by their mother, allowing them to expand the Antone’s sandwich brand throughout Houston.

Then, in 1976, a 20-year-old man arrived in Houston from Lebanon, escaping a civil war back home. He enrolled at the University of Houston in civil engineering with dreams of working in the oil industry. He took a part-time job at Antone’s to support himself.

That man was Antonios “Tony” Okde.

Bitter feuds

At first, Okde said he never considered working at Antone’s for long. “It was just part time,” he said. But he grew to love the job and was promoted regularly, from cashier to manager to buyer to general manager. By 1990, he was vice president and director of operations.

Josephine Antone, his friend and boss for almost 30 years, died in 2003. Okde was heartbroken. “I was protective of her,” he said. “God rest her soul, she was an amazing person.”

Okde didn’t get along as well with Antone’s daughters, though.

In the 1980s, with Okde and Josephine Antone on the board of Antone’s, the company sued sisters Mary Jo Antone-Hatfield and Jamie Lee for allegedly violating their J.J. Gregory licensing agreement, according to Chronicle archives. The case went to arbitration, and the daughters won.

Antone’s sued them again, in 1992. Among other things, the original Antone’s alleged that J.J. Gregory wasn’t paying sufficient royalties and was selling its sandwiches to grocery stores. The daughters fought back, accusing Okde of squandering company assets.

At the time, in addition to Okde and Josephine Antone, Peter Basralian served on the company’s board.

The Antone sisters viewed the men as interlopers. “She has been exploited and manipulated,” Antone-Hatfield said of her mother to the Chronicle in 1996. “It’s tragic. We have no relationship now.”

Basralian, who now works at Phoenicia Speciality Foods, denied that he manipulated Josephine Antone. “I never manipulated anybody,” he said. “That’s a damn bald-faced lie.” (Gerald DiNisco, Josephine’s lawyer, told the Chronicle in 1996 that he had “no doubt” Josephine was “competent and in control.”)

The sisters tried to sell J.J. Gregory in 1996 — prompting Antone’s to sue again on the basis that selling their franchise violated the license agreement.

Okde counters that the feuds were just family jealousy. He says he became like a son to Josephine Antone — and there’s evidence to back him up. When he was leaving the company in 1999, Antone asked him to stay, according to a court record. A 1991 article from DBA, a Houston business journal, shows the pair beaming under the headline: “Mama and Her Po’ Boy.”

Attempts to reach Jamie Lee Antone were unsuccessful.

Working at Antone’s sandwiches was never Antone-Hatfield’s plan in life. “I cut a record in L.A. with Sammy Davis’ band,” she said. “I studied music and theater. That’s what I was going to do.”

Then, in the mid-1970s, her life took a turn. She was going through a divorce, and her father died.

“My father had asked me: ‘Please, learn the business and take care of it and expand it,’” Antone-Hatfield said.

New chapter

As Antone’s floundered, restaurant investor Niel Morgan bought out its assets in stages.

He bought J.J. Gregory assets in 1996 while the company was in bankruptcy court. He acquired the trademarks owned by Josephine Antone around 2005, he said, after she had died.

Morgan founded Legacy in 2006. As the new head of Antone’s, he tried out new business concepts — like lighter Italian fare and, later, salads.

Antone’s “has evolved into a more traditional restaurant” over the years, its website explains.

Morgan has been eating at Antone’s since the 1970s — long enough that he has pro tips on eating them.

“They taste better if you let them come back to room temperature,” he said. “Put them in an oven at around 250 degrees for a few minutes.”

Horowitz, the Legacy CEO, remembers discovering Antone’s sandwiches in the 1990s, when he was a student at Rice University. He used to eat at the store in Rice Village — an Okde franchise that closed in 2011.

“I’ve always been into the turkey and swiss,” he said. “I’m very much a creature of habit.”

In August, Legacy announced expansions for Antone’s. The chain would expand to Austin and inside NRG Stadium.

The Okdes, meanwhile, are back in business under different names. Tony runs Angelo’z, on Kirby near Main. His ex-wife Ann runs Paulie’s Poboys on Bellaire — renamed after their 31-year-old son Paul “Paulie” Okde, who has worked at the stores since he was a kid. Their daughter, 24-year-old daughter Sylvana Okde, also works there.

It’s too soon to tell whether losing the Antone’s brand will hurt the Okdes’ bottom line. But it probably won’t hurt Houston’s culinary scene.

In 2013, Houstonia magazine discussed the dwindling or extinct varieties of Houston po’ boys — Butera’s, for example — and wondered if the sandwich was “dying out.” The magazine named two culprits in the decline: the rise of chain sandwich shops (Subway, Jimmy John’s, Quiznos) and Houston’s ongoing love affair with banh mi.

Though Paulie’s and Angelo’z are no longer Antone’s, they might help preserve the tradition of the famous Houston sandwich.

The Okdes seem to be coming around. Sylvana said she is working on the new Paulie’s logos. Paulie’s already has plans to open a new branch, on Westheimer near Kirkwood on the west side.

Over the months, she’s gone from angry to excited. The name changes turned out to be “a blessing in disguise,” she said. “Sometimes, the rainbow comes after the rain. This is the rainbow: We already have a product that people like.”

Stephen Paulsen is a writer in Houston. Email: food@chron.com