Texas Weiner

On Friday, October 13, 1961, four partners (Carmen La Mendola, Domenick Sportelli, Nick Dorris and Peter Leonidas) opened a small building across from Nash Park in Clifton, New Jersey, with 20 counter stools and one purpose: to give the neighborhood Texas weiners. The Hot Grill has fried them ever since. A blend of beef and pork goes into hot oil, the fryer hisses, and the skin tightens and blisters at the edges until the dog comes out dark, glossy and firm. That fry sets the texture for everything laid on top, because a dog with a crisp skin keeps its snap under a wet topping from the counter to the last bite.

The topping goes on in a fixed order that the counter calls all the way: yellow mustard, chopped raw onion, and the house chili, all at one price. The chili is thin and mahogany-colored and meant as a condiment, so it runs down the sides of the bun and soaks into the soft crumb. The first bite cracks the skin, and the sauce is still hot enough that steam rises off the bun when it is opened. Then the hot, faintly sweet meat sauce arrives together with cold onion and sharp mustard. The bun gives way almost at once under the sauce. The whole build is meant to be eaten over its paper, quickly, while the skin still holds and the onion is still cold.

The sauce is the part the Hot Grill keeps to itself, and its recipe stays a house secret. Its ancestry is plain from the taste and the texture: the Paterson-style Texas wiener carries a Greek meat sauce, the kind spooned over spaghetti at home, thinned until it coats a frankfurter. A beef-based topping like that reads as savory first and hot only a long way behind, and its thin body lets it cling along the whole length of the dog and pool in the bottom of the bun. The fried skin gives it something to hold onto, and a regular learns to lean forward over the paper for the first bite.

Clifton is a fry town, and the hot dog there comes out of oil. A few miles away on River Road, Rutt's Hut drops its dogs into oil until the casing splits and tops them with a cabbage relish, so a fried hot dog is an ordinary order across town. The Hot Grill's other signature is cheese-and-gravy french fries, ordered next to the wieners: fries under melted cheese and gravy, a heavy side for a dog that eats in a few bites. Cheese and gravy over fries is a diner order across New Jersey, and here it shares the counter with a wiener that arrives hot from the fryer.

Of the four partners, Sportelli and La Mendola have been reported as the surviving owners, with the other two deceased, and the restaurant has passed its sixtieth year. The fryer is the center of the kitchen, and the loudest sound at the counter is a basket of dogs going down into the oil. The shorthand at the register is the same two words as the card above: all the way, which covers mustard, onion and sauce in one breath.

Origin and History

The Texas weiner begins in Paterson, New Jersey, in the early 1920s. Local oral history dates the first one to around 1924 and credits an elderly Greek immigrant who sold hot dogs from a stand and experimented with a chili-style topping drawn from his own cooking. The sauce that came out of that experiment was a Greek-style meat topping that local cooks called chili, and the combination spread out from Paterson into the mill towns around it.

Later retellings often credit the first Paterson stand to a man named John Petrellis. No record names the first cook with certainty, and the word Texas has never been tied to any Texan ingredient or cook. What the Paterson shops did with it afterward is on firmer ground: Libby's Lunch served Texas wieners on McBride Avenue in Paterson from 1936 until it closed in 2020, and the style was in Clifton by 1961, when the Hot Grill opened.

The Hot Grill carries the Clifton branch of that lineage. The four partners opened on October 13, 1961, with 20 stools. After seven years the building had grown to booths and seating for 60, and in the 1980s it reached 145 seats, all for a menu that still centers on the fried wiener sold all the way.