Newark Hot Dog

The frankfurter is dropped into hot oil, not laid on a griddle, and it stays there until the casing blisters, tightens, and splits down its length, which is why a Newark counterman calls the result a ripper. The potatoes go in the same oil. So do the peppers and onions. Then a round of soft Italian pizza bread is torn open into a pocket and the whole oil-crisped load is packed down inside it, eaten standing from the open end. This is the Newark hot dog, and its governing idea is a deep fryer doing to a frankfurter and a plate of potatoes what a flat-top does to a cheesesteak.

The potatoes are what make it a Newark thing rather than a hot dog with toppings. Cut into rounds or thick half-moons and fried until the edges go hard and the centers stay soft, they are packed in by the handful, a quarter pound or more wedged down around the dogs, so the sandwich eats as much like fried potatoes as like a frankfurter. They are starchy ballast, structural and filling at once, the reason a single small frank turns into a lunch a working city could stand behind. Fried sweet peppers and onions go in with them, soft and oily, threading sweetness and a little char through the salt. The mustard is laid against the bread first so it does not get lost under the pile.

The pocket is the whole reason the bread changes. A split bun carries one frank along a hinge and quits there; it cannot hold two rippers stood upright with a fistful of fried potatoes and a slick of peppers driven in around them. So the build abandons the hinge for a hollow. A quarter or half of a wide round pizza loaf is opened into a deep cavity, and the order it is loaded is the engineering: dogs stood against the back wall, potatoes rammed in to lock them, peppers and onions worked into the gaps to bind the mass. Too soft a crumb and the oil-soaked load tears the bread open in the hand; too dense and the crust scrapes the palate raw and refuses to give. Built right, the pocket holds a half pound of fried food in compression and nothing slides out the open end before it is gone.

You order one and watch it built fast at a steel counter that has done this and little else for ninety years. The dogs come out of the oil hissing, the casings already burst and curling at the splits, and the smell off the fryer is hot fat and scorched onion before you reach the register. The bread tears with a dull rasp as it is opened. The potatoes go in still ticking from the oil. The first bite is too hot to be wise, the casing snapping against the soft starch behind it, grease blooming through the bread and into the paper in your hand, the fried peppers sweet and slack against the salt of the dog. It is heavy, loud food, and the weight is the point of it.

It belongs to a stretch of North Jersey the way few sandwiches belong anywhere. The name on the form is the founding stand's, Jimmy Buff's, and a generation of Newark families measured the others against it: Dickie Dee's still frying them in the city's North Ward, Tommy's over in Elizabeth, Charlie's out in Kenilworth. The shared dialect is the order itself, "one with everything" meaning dog, potatoes, peppers, onions, and mustard in the bread, and the working-class memory underneath it is plain, a Depression-era snack from a card table that fed a factory town and never priced itself out of it. Calling it just an Italian hot dog flattens a thing the neighborhood treats as its own.

Its relatives split cleanly from it. The single-dog build that stops at one frank and a few potatoes is the small order of the same sandwich, not a different one. The Italian sausage version runs a fried sausage down the same pocket and is its own item with its own following. Beyond Newark the national hot dog map argues about toppings on a split bun, sauces and relishes and chili, and that argument never reaches this sandwich, because the Newark dog changed the bread and dropped the whole thing in oil before the toppings were ever discussed. It is the rare hot dog defined by its frying and its pocket rather than by what gets spooned on top.

A Card Game in the North Ward

The origin is unusually well documented for a street food, and it begins at a card table. In 1932, in the North Ward of Newark, a man named James Racioppi and his wife Mary were hosting the weekly card game at their apartment, and Mary fried hot dogs with peppers, onions, and potatoes and tucked them into Italian bread to feed the players. The food outgrew the game; people began coming for the sandwich, and the Racioppis opened a stand for it that year. The dish has a dated birth, a named cook, and a room it was first served in, which is more than most sandwiches can show.

The name came off the card game too. Racioppi was a bluffer at the table, and "Buff" was the local shorthand for a bluffer rendered through a heavy accent, so the stand became Jimmy Buff's after the way its owner played his hands rather than after anything on the menu. The original Newark stand opened in 1932 at 202 14th Avenue, at the corner of 9th Street, in the University Heights section of the city, and it ran there for decades.

That first location closed in 1974, but the sandwich did not. Jimmy Buff's reopened in the suburbs and still fries the rippers to the near-century-old method in West Orange and Kenilworth, and the rival Newark-style stands that grew up around it carry the same build. The whole tradition traces to one specific evening of card-table cooking by Mary Racioppi in Newark's North Ward in 1932.