Dog Days

Hot Dogs. Franks. Wienies. Deadly Missiles. We’re talking American icon. The summertime specialty. Pulverized meat wedged into an animal-intestine casing and steamed, boiled, fried or grilled, then plopped into a roll and garnished according to regional preference.

But the hot dog itself has little to do with the cult of the hot dog, a dense and smoky world with its own customs, lingo, buildings and vehicles glorifying this wily offspring of the German sausage. The following shrines were selected for devotion and creativity beyond the call of duty in delivering a decent dog to a hungry public.

Nathan’s Famous
Coney Island, New York
At Nathan’s Coney Island, there is a separate line for each dish, so if you want a Coke and a fried-clam chaser for your world-famous hot dog, you have to stand in three different lines — which isn’t a problem in the spring. “But in the summer, look out,” says Sol Gaver, who started in French fries thirty-two years ago. Sol says he’s seen fistfights break out in long lines. “Fighting over a hot dog,” he says, shaking his head, “can you believe it?”

Founded in 1916, Nathan’s is reputedly the oldest fast-food franchise in the world. Nathan Handwerker and his wife, Ida, both young Polish immigrants, met and fell in love as bun slicers at Feltman’s of Coney Island. That’s where, as legend has it, they were encouraged to open their own place by two singing waiters named Jimmy Durante and Eddie Cantor. With $300 saved from bun slicing, Nathan and Ida opened a small stand selling a lightly spiced all-beef dog for a nickel. The dogs sold like crazy; everyone else was charging a dime.

Celebrities on both sides of the counter are a rich part of Nathan’s lore. Cary Grant was a stilt walker with a sandwich board for the stand when he was Archie Leach, and Clara Bow was a bun slicer here when she called herself Clara Bartonelli. This summer keep your eyes peeled for Jackie Onassis (her real name), a rumored Nathan’s fan, as well as scores of politicians with Nathan’s dogs mugging for photographers — a seeming prerequisite for any Gotham political career. And, of course, there’s the annual hot-dog-eating competition on July 4th; last year the sumo-size Japanese champion beat out his American counterpart by eating fourteen and a half hot dogs in eight and a half minutes.

Fenway Park
Boston
Entering the 1986 season, the Boston Red Sox had three strikes against them: Bill Buckner’s ankles, their pitching and the Fenway Frank. Perhaps no hot dog has been as maligned as the dog once served to unsuspecting Sox fans. “Fleshy pink links with a mortuarial flavor that conjures horrifying images of ground-up eyelids, lips and snouts of pigs,” wrote roadside-food experts Jane and Michael Stern.

But all that changed with the ’86 season. Buckner got corrective shoes, Sox pitching came together, the wins started rolling in, and the Fenway Frank, up until then made by Colonial Hot Dogs, was revamped by Kirschner of Maine.

“We took out some of the water and changed the recipe,” says Tyler Phillips, vice-president of marketing for Kirschner. The fans took notice. Kirschner worked triple shifts to keep them munching through the Sox’ championship season, and at one point an extra two trailerloads had to be rushed south as championship-series attendance and extra-inning games depleted the Fenway wiener war chests. Bob Lurie, the owner of the San Francisco Giants, enjoyed the Fenway Frank so much during the World Series that he decided to have the frank shipped west, ten cases at a time, for consumption in his private box at Candlestick Park.

Eddie Andelman, the host of a popular sports phone-in show on radio station WHDH, in Boston, is among the frank’s lingering critics. “Sure, the squirt factor is better,” he says, referring to the hot jet of moisture all fans experience on their initial bite into a ballpark frank. “But I’d still rank it in the bottom third of the league, not because of the frank itself but the way it’s prepared: sitting in that water for centuries and then brought to you by a vendor in a stained apron — I swear they must rent them that way — who gives it to you with one of those sissy-type mustard packets. If you don’t have a pair of scissors, how are you supposed to put mustard on your dog?”

The frank fares better among Boston sportswriters, who nevertheless contend it is not yet championship material. An informal poll rated Milwaukee and Anaheim as top dogs, with Baltimore and Cleveland only a half frank back. But, in the end, a hot dog at the ballpark, in the words of Boston Globe scribe Neil Singelais, “would have to be awfully bad for it not to be good.”