The Michigan hot dog is not from Michigan, and the misplaced name is the first thing to understand about it. It is the red-sauce dog of the North Country, the upstate New York corner around Plattsburgh and the Adirondacks, where a hot dog under a fine, spiced meat sauce is called a Michigan and defended as a local institution. The defining feature is the sauce itself, which is closer to a smooth, slightly sweet, lightly spiced ground-meat sauce than to the chili-adjacent topping on a downstate coney or a Detroit coney. Despite sharing the meat-sauce idea with those, the Michigan is its own build with its own rules, and the people who grew up on it will correct anyone who calls it a coney.
The craft is in the sauce and the order of assembly. The sauce is a finely ground beef simmered down with a tomato base and a restrained spice mix until it is loose but not soupy, smooth enough to spoon along the length of the dog rather than chunk over it. The frankfurter is steamed or griddled and the bun is a soft top-split roll, the same neutral, yielding carrier that lets the topping be the regional signature. The order matters and is itself a local argument: a buried dog has the onions under the sauce, a topless dog has them on top, and asking for one or the other is the native shorthand. Raw chopped onion and a stripe of yellow mustard supply the sharp, acidic counter that keeps the sweet, fatty sauce from reading as one heavy note, and the bun is sized so it survives the wet load without going to paste before the last bite.
The variations are mostly the buried-and-topless question and the heat level, with some stands running a hotter sauce or a coarser grind. A double dog in one bun scales it up; a side of the sauce over fries is a common companion order. The downstate New York white hot, the Detroit and Cincinnati coneys, the Carolina slaw dog, and the New Jersey Italian dog are all distinct regional hot dogs with their own rules, and each of those deserves its own article rather than being crowded in here.