In Search of the Coney

A parlor in the early twentieth century. The city street outside the window is loud, but the drapes are drawn in this room. The ceiling: shrouded in cigar smoke. The parlor: filled with squat, dark-haired men. These are immigrants, born on distant islands. Now they are in America, discussing hot dogs.

Americans already know and like hot dogs. They line up at Coney Island for sausages in rolls, which they buy from Germans. Hot dogs are sold at baseball games, another thing borrowed and thoroughly Americanized. But the Greeks and Macedonians in the room will improve upon the hot dog, topping it with a meat-based sauce laced with the seasonings of their homelands. The sauce will be known as “chili,” but it will bear little resemblance to the chili con carne of the South, studded with beans and punctuated with hot peppers. They will perfect this Greek chili and then disperse, spreading across the country to open hot dog stands. Their recipes will become family secrets, their hot dogs famous.

It might be 1905, or it could be 1913. It could be the year the Wright Brothers make their first secret flight over the dunes of Carolina, or it could be the year that the famous luxury liner hits ice in the north Atlantic. It could be Brooklyn, or New Jersey. Coney Island could be in the neighborhood, or it could be miles away. Either way, Nathan’s Famous, with its nickel franks and white coats, isn’t open yet.

The secret hot dog society is just a theory, and it’s not even mine.

The idea belongs to Hawk Krall, a Philadelphia-based artist who knows a lot—a lot—about hot dogs. In his weekly columns for the Web site Serious Eats, which he also illustrates, Krall has suggested this idea at least twice: the secret Greek hot dog society that plots the mainstreaming of the chili dog. In his “Hot Dog of the Week” features, he first jokes that the secret hot dog society met in 1915. Later he amends his statement to 1903.

He’s kidding. I think.

But the joke is as good an explanation as any for how the coney hot dog came to colonize America. The coney, also known as a Michigan, or the universally misspelled Texas weiner, or a Paterson, or a Greeker, is found in seemingly random pockets of the Northeast, Great Lakes and larger Midwest. It’s in Buffalo, and in Cincinnati, and in New York City. But also in New Jersey, and in Michigan, and even way up in Plattsburgh, New York.

Pinpointing the exact origin of the coney is a little like trying to determine an earthquake’s epicenter. Seismologists can only triangulate the most likely origin of a seismic disturbance, using data collected from the Earth. My task is much the same, except for the part about P and S waves. When it comes to chasing the coney, I only have ghosts and legends and old hometowns. Fortunately for me, hot dogs are delicious.

Why coneys? Start, as so many food obsessions do, with home. Or what remains of it.

I start with Ohio.

My mother was born and raised in southern Ohio, in aptly named Middletown: I-75, between Dayton and Cincinnati. I was born in Cincinnati, too, but we left when I was three. Instead, every summer my mother and I would drive from Buffalo to Middletown. There was nothing to do in Middletown except walk to the Towne Mall, which had a JCPenney and a Skyline Chili. My cousin Robert and I would eat coneys for lunch, and then we’d walk back to my aunt’s house, where yet another family reunion would be in progress and our mothers would be loud and drunk.

Robert taught me that Skyline was the only chili worth eating. It’s true that there are numerous chili parlors in the city, the most famous being Camp Washington and Empress, but before either of us could drive, Skyline was our only choice. There was a Gold Star, another local chain, in Towne Mall, but Robert said that only whores ate at Gold Star.

We would seat ourselves. The menus were tucked behind the napkin dispenser. When our server greeted us, she brought each our own small white dish of oyster crackers, which we ate while waiting on our Dr Peppers.

At Skyline, I had to choose between chili on a hot dog or chili on spaghetti. I always chose hot dogs. My coneys would be small and nondescript, wedged into steamed buns. I could watch the counter workers flipping open the stainless-steel steam trays and spearing my dogs from the fifty or so already prepared. The coney was notable for what came on it—Cincinnati chili, which is tinged with cinnamon and oregano and cocoa, and then great clouds of finely shredded mild cheddar cheese, and mustard and diced onions. I could eat two easily. The third coney usually hurt, but I learned to skip the oyster crackers to save room.

At Skyline, the bibs were plastic and free, though I had to ask for one, and at the end of my meal I would carefully untie it and check to see if the little upturned hem had caught any stray cheese or chili, and if it had, I would raise my eyebrows at my cousin and then slurp the bits. This would have been considered uncouth in any real city, but then again, it was only Middletown.

When my family first moved to Buffalo, from New Jersey, my father fell in love with Sahlen’s hot dogs. In Buffalo, there are chicken wings, yes, and beef on weck, but there is also a surprisingly large and committed hot dog subculture. The local favorite is Sahlen’s, the official hot dog of the Bills—a slightly spiced pork-and-beef mixture stuffed into a natural casing, cinched with little tips that harden on the grill. My father bought them in five-pound bags, and we ate them for quick dinners when my mother was working evenings on the hospital floor.

My brother and I had no appreciation, and thus no use, for Sahlen’s. They were too long for regular hot dog buns, and the blackened tips were chewy, and the spiced meat was oddly sharp. We preferred the blandness of Ball Park franks, which were not encased in anything, but which we could wrap in a slice of American cheese and eat cold from the fridge after school.

Sahlen’s are slung all over western New York. The most famous of the Buffalo hot dog stands is Ted’s, which was opened by a Greek immigrant in 1927 on the West Side, right near the Peace Bridge. But nearly every Greek diner in town—and there are many—serves what they call Texas hots. When I was in high school, my friends and I met at our favorite, Tom’s, to drink black coffee and practice smoking cigarettes and eat hots.

Buffalo is a tough town, a steel town, and its food reflects that. Chicken wings were considered useless before Teressa Bellissimo dunked them in a fryer and tossed them in sauce. Pierogies are peasant food. Beef on weck is heavy on salt, caraway, horseradish. And hot dogs, as we all know, are mostly scraps. This is working-class food, best washed down with a cheap pint of Molson or Labatt’s, in sight of a lake waterfront that has been slated for gentrification for forty years now.

And yet, despite its status as international winter punch line, Buffalo gets less snow than Rochester and Syracuse. The summers are beautiful, and breezy seventy-three-degree days are perfect for enjoying a Texas hot: a Sahlen’s with hot sauce.

In Buffalo, there are two kinds of hot sauce. Actual hot sauce, as in wings, is Frank’s Red Hot. But “hot sauce” in reference to hot dogs is known as Texas hot sauce, or sometimes in Greek diners as Texas petal sauce, and under it, a Sahlen’s hot dog becomes something magic. The spiced meat is grill-blistered, and the chili echoes that sweet heat. If you were to eat one or two of these Texas hots in a carefully selected location in Buffalo, perhaps in Delaware Park, on a June afternoon, with a cold Loganberry to drink, you might even like Buffalo.

So, to recap: in Buffalo, New York, you can eat a chili dog that is a lot like a coney, but you’ll have to order it by invoking Texas, which has never heard of such a thing.