They also have very little to do
with the New York City amusement park
By Erick Trickey
SMITHSONIAN.COM
This July 4, as with every July 4
going back to the 1970s, an all-American display of gluttony will feature
rubber-stomached competitive eaters once again gorging themselves in the
Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest on Brooklyn’s Coney Island. This year’s
gastronomic battle, at the corner of Surf and Stillwell avenues, will honor the
100th anniversary of the founding of Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs at the same
corner in 1916.
It’s a patriotic event, and not
just because it’ll be echoed at holiday barbecues across the country. The hot
dog, that quintessential American food, has been associated with Coney Island,
America’s most storied amusement resort, since frankfurter first met bun. But
Nathan’s century-old triumph of entrepreneurship is only part of the
Ellis-Island-meets-Coney-Island story. Thanks to immigrants from Northern and
Eastern Europe alike, the name “Coney Island hot dog” means one thing in New
York, another in the Midwest and beyond.
Historians disagree on the hot
dog’s origin story, but many credit Charles Feltman, a Coney Island pie-wagon
vendor, with inventing the fast food, serving hot dachshund sausages in milk
rolls as early as 1867. The National Hot Dog and Sausage Councilsays Feltman
opened a hot dog stand on Coney Island in 1871 and sold 3,684 sausages that
year. Wieners took Feltman far. By the turn of the century, he’d gone upscale,
with Feltman’s German Gardens, a huge complex of restaurants and beer gardens
on Surf Avenue that employed 1,200 waiters. Though seafood became Feltman’s
specialty, he still had seven grills dedicated to hot dogs, which he sold in
the 1910s for ten cents apiece.
Nathan Handwerker, a Polish
immigrant with a day job as a restaurant delivery boy, worked Sunday afternoons
at Feltman’s German Gardens, slicing rolls. According to Handwerker’s 1974 New
York Times obituary, Jimmy Durante and Eddie Cantor, who worked as singing
waiters on Coney Island before they found fame, encouraged Handwerker to strike
out from Feltman’s and sell hot dogs for a nickel instead of a dime. In 1916,
he did just that, opening a small hot-dog stand at Surf and Stillwell with his
wife, Ida. The subway’s extension to Coney Island in 1920 brought countless New
Yorkers to his stand. “Society people, politicians, actors and sportsmen
flocked to Nathan’s,” the obituary recalled, “brushing shoulders with truck
drivers, laborers, and housewives.” Franklin D. Roosevelt famously served
Nathan’s hot dogs at a 1936 lawn party for Britain’s George VI and his wife,
Queen Elizabeth (mother of the now-reigning Queen Elizabeth II).
Meanwhile, outside New York, the
Coney Island name evokes an entirely different hot-dog tradition. In Michigan,
“Coney Island” doesn’t mean an amusement park, but one of an estimated 500
diners in the Metro Detroit area alone
that serve Greek food and “Coney dogs” -- hot dogs smothered in chili or
ground beef, plus mustard and onions. There are plenty more elsewhere in
Michigan, across the Midwest, and beyond.
The Coney dog was spread across
the eastern U.S. by various Greek and Macedonian immigrants in the 1900s and
1910s. The restaurateurs were part of the great wave of Greek migration to the
U.S. – 343,000 people between 1900 and 1919 – who fled the economic desolation
caused by Greece’s 1893 bankruptcy and a crash in the price of currants, then
Greece’s main export. “Many of them passed through New York’s Ellis Island and
heard about or visited Coney Island, later borrowing this name for their hot
dogs, according to one legend,” wrote Katherine Yung and Joe Grimm in their
2012 book Coney Detroit.
In that era, Americans associated
New York’s Coney Island with hot dog authenticity. Back then, the name “hot
dog” was out of favor; amid the concern about meat-packing standards inspired
by Upton Sinclair’s book The Jungle, it still carried a hint of suggestion that
the cheap sausages were made of dog meat. Handwerker called then “red hots,”
others “Coney Island hots.”
Naming the inventor of the Coney
dog – the first person to slather chili or sprinkle ground beef on a sausage –
is a fool’s errand. Various Coney Island restaurants in Michigan and Indiana
vie for the title, claiming founding dates in the mid-1910s, but they don’t
appear in city directories from the era until the 1920s. Many Greeks and
Macedonians likely hit upon the idea of dressing hot dogs in variations on
saltsa kima, their homeland’s spicy tomato-based meat sauce. “The Coney
Island’s formidable beef topping with a sweet-hot twang has a marked Greek
accent,” wrote Jane and Michael Stern in their 2009 book 500 Things to Eat
Before It’s Too Late.
It’s easy, though, to locate the
Coney dog’s ground zero, the Midwest’s version of Surf and Stillwell: the
corner of West Lafayette Boulevard and Michigan Avenue in Detroit.
There, Lafayette Coney Island and
American Coney Island have carried on a sibling rivalry for 80 years. For
generations of Detroiters, their chili-topped weiners have been the ultimate
urban-diner experience, the workingman’s lunch and the late-night craving after
last call. Brothers William “Bill” Keros and Constantine “Gust” Keros, former
sheepherders from the Greek village of Dara, founded the two diners to serve
hot dogs to autoworkers. Each restaurant boasts it opened first, with American
Coney staking a claim to a 1917 founding, Lafayette Coney to 1914. But city
directories tell a different story than family and business oral history: the
Coney Detroit authors say the brothers opened Lafayette Coney together in 1923,
and Gust Keros opened American Coney in 1936 after a falling-out with his brother.
Outside metropolitan Detroit,
Coney dog variations abound. In Michigan cities such as Flint, Jackson and
Kalamazoo, their topping isn’t chili, but a sauce that’s mostly ground beef,
often including beef hearts. A few Coney Island restaurants still exist outside
Michigan, from the Coney Island Grill in St. Petersburg, Florida, to George’s
Coney Island in Worcester, Massachusetts. Cincinnati’s version of Coney sauce
is a chili, invented in 1922 by Macedonian immigrants Tom and John Kiradjieff
as their own spiced version of saltsa kima. That iteration doesn't just go on
hot dogs-- it's also served with spaghetti or as a stand-alone chili.
Closer to New York City, the
names change. Rhode Islanders call their Greek-immigrant chili-dog diners “New
York System” restaurants, and they serve “hot wieners” – never hot dogs. “They
are made in a systemic way,” wrote the Sterns in 500 Things to Eat, “by lining
up all the dogs in buns and dressing them assembly-line-style.”
But in far
upstate New York, around Plattsburgh, they’re called Michigans, probably thanks
to 1920s Detroit expatriates Eula and Garth Otis. From there, they smuggled
themselves across the Canadian border, where the Montreal-area hot-dog chain
Resto Lafleur offers a steamed or grilled “hot-dog Michigan” and poutine with
“la sauce Michigan.”
Today, Nathan’s is an
international chain, with more than 300 restaurants and stands, mostly on the
East Coast. It’s added a chili dog to its menu. In another example of hazy
hot-dog lore, Nathan’s apocryphally claims it’s about to host its 100th
hot-dog-eating contest – actually a creation of carnival-barker-style bunkum
that started in the 1970s. Meanwhile, Coney Island blogger and historian
Michael Quinn is reviving the Feltman’s red-hots brand, which went extinct with
Feltman’s restaurant in 1954. He’s teamed up with a sausage-maker to make a red
hot in homage to the original, which he’s selling at pop-up events. In a
history-minded revenge, Quinn sells hot dogs for half of Nathan’s price.