to embrace the nickname, figuring that, "A crumb is bigger than a speck." By 1860, Speck had opened his own restaurant, called Crum's, on Storey Hill in nearby Malta, New York. His cuisine was in high demand among Saratoga Springs' tourists and elites: "His prices were…those of the fashionable New York restaurants, but his food and service were worth it…Everything possible was raised on his own small farm, and that, too, got his personal attention whenever he could arrange it." According to popular accounts, he was said to include a basket of chips on every table. One contemporaneous source recalls that in his restaurant, Speck was unquestionably the man in charge: "His rules of procedure were his own. They were very strict, and being an Indian, he never departed from them. In the slang of the racecourse, he "played no favorites." Guests were obliged to wait their turn, the millionaire as well as the wage-earner. Mr. Vanderbilt once was obliged to wait an hour and a half for a meal...With none but rich pleasure-seekers as his guests, Speck kept his tables laden with the best of everything, and for it all charged Delmonico prices."<ref>New York Tribune December 27, 1891</ref Potato chip After his death, a local legend developed which credited Speck with the invention of potato chips. However, according to Snopes, he "never made the claim that he had invented the potato chip, let alone claimed the tale as his own — those assertions emerged only many years after his death". Recipes for frying potato slices were published in several cookbooks in the 19th century. In 1832, a recipe for fried potato "shavings" was included in a United States cookbook derived from an earlier English collection. William Kitchiner's The Cook's Oracle (1817), also included techniques for such a dish. Similarly, N. K. M. Lee's cookbook, The Cook's Own Book (1832), has a recipe that is very similar to Kitchiner's. The New York Tribune ran a feature article on "Crum's: The Famous Eating House on Saratoga Lake" in December 1891, but mentioned nothing about potato chips. Neither did Crum's commissioned biography, published in 1893, nor did one 1914 obituary in a local paper. Another obituary states "Crum is said to have been the actual inventor of "Saratoga chips."" When Wicks died in 1924, however, her obituary authoritatively identified her as follows: "A sister of George Crum, Mrs. Catherine Wicks, died at