Coney Island Hot Dog (Original)

A nickel bought a hot dog in 1916 at the corner of Surf and Stillwell Avenues in Brooklyn, where Nathan Handwerker had opened a stand with about $300 of saved wages. A few blocks away Feltman's was charging twice that for the same kind of sausage in a roll. The stand's dog is a spiced all-beef frankfurter that spits and blisters on the grill until the skin has a dark, uneven blush, and the first bite breaks through that casing with a small audible snap before the hot, peppery interior reaches the mustard. The bun is soft enough to fold around the link without tearing and gives way to it at once. Salt air, fryer oil, and charred beef hang over the whole counter, and the smell reaches the end of the block before the line does.

Handwerker had worked for Feltman, and the price was the whole of his argument. Charles Feltman had started in 1867 with a pushcart that sold pies to beachfront hotels, and the cart's charcoal stove and its sausages in rolls were an answer to customers who wanted something to eat with their hands. By 1916 Feltman's was a sprawling restaurant complex, and a dog there carried a price to match. A well-worn story says Handwerker hired men to stand at the counter in white coats and eat, so that nervous customers would read them as doctors vouching for the meat. Nobody has documented the white coats, but the tale shows what he was selling: reassurance, at five cents, to a crowd that had just ridden the subway out to the sand.

The dressing stays short, and that brevity is the structure of the thing. A stripe of yellow mustard runs the length of the link and sauerkraut goes on in a loose pile, the vinegar and the mustard cutting the beef fat in the same two motions. Anything wetter would slide off the grilled skin or soften the bun before the customer had walked ten steps. The format suits the boardwalk, which opened in 1923: one hand holds the bun, the other a paper tray of crinkle-cut fries, and nothing needs a knife. In the wind off the Atlantic the link cools quickly, so the first half goes fast.

On a summer weekend the counter works like a relay. Cooks line links across the grill in rows, and each customer reaches the front already knowing the order. The hot dog became the lunch a family of five could afford on a day at the beach, and the amusement-park crowds of the early twentieth century made it their default meal. The price is higher now, but the format keeps the early speed: two with kraut, mustard on both, handed over in a paper sleeve before the person behind has finished deciding.

The name travelled far from the beach. Greek and Macedonian immigrants who opened lunch counters in Michigan and Ohio borrowed Coney Island for their own dogs, which carry a loose beef chili where the Brooklyn original carries mustard and kraut. In Brooklyn the name needs no gloss. It points at an address a few steps from the Cyclone and the Wonder Wheel, and at a frankfurter whose spicing the company describes as little changed in a century. The stand sells crinkle-cut fries alongside, and they have loyal defenders of their own.

Feltman's pie wagon and Nathan's nickel

The oldest documented link in the chain is Charles Feltman's cart. In 1867 the German-born baker wheeled a pie wagon along the Coney Island beach, and when buyers asked for something more filling he added a small stove and began selling sausages in rolls. Several sources date the larger restaurant and pleasure ground he built on Surf Avenue to 1871, and it grew into one of the resort's biggest names.

Nathan's Famous opened in 1916, and accounts disagree on details of the founder's life before it: sources give his arrival in New York as 1902 or as 1912, and tell different stories about how he came to work for Feltman. The stand's own account says the original spice recipe came from the grandmother of Handwerker's wife, Ida, and the 1916 nickel price, half the going rate, is the one fact on which the tellings agree.

The stand's other famous date is softer than it looks. A story says Nathan's held its first July Fourth eating contest in 1916, to settle a dispute among immigrants over who was most patriotic. The publicist Mortimer Matz later said he and a partner had invented that tale in the early 1970s to promote the event, and the first contest on record took place in 1972, at the same Surf and Stillwell corner where the nickel dog had been sold fifty-six years earlier.