The surprising history behind America's longest running hot dog stand

We may never have answers to all the questions that shroud the hot dog: Who invented America’s signature dish? Where did the name come from? And are hot-dog eating contests—like the famous one taking place at Nathan’s Famous, in Brooklyn, this weekend—a shameful display of excess or a joyful expression of patriotic and gastronomic pride? (Why not both?)

One thing we know for sure is that the hot dog is indelibly American, tied forever to the explosion of energy in this country that marked the dawn of the 20th century. Then, as today, hot dogs were cheap, filling, not particularly healthy, endlessly marketable, and, perhaps most important for a nation rushing headlong into the future, easy to eat on the run. 

Also not up for debate: No establishment has been hawking hot dogs longer than Fort Wayne’s Famous Coney Island in Fort Wayne, Indiana. For 112 years, the Main Street diner has been delighting diners with its flattop-grilled wieners.

Fort Wayne’s Famous Coney Island dresses their dogs with yellow mustard, hand-chopped onions, and a secret sauce made from a precise blend of spices known only to owners Jimmy Todoron and Kathy Choka. This is a classic “Coney Island,” a hot dog style still found throughout the upper Midwest.

The term is likely a tribute to the German immigrant Charles Feltman, who popularized hot dogs in the late 1860s by selling them from a converted pie cart on Brooklyn’s Coney Island Beach. In 1916, one of Feltman’s employees, Nathan Handwerker, left to open his own stand just down the boardwalk. Nathan’s Famous would come to dominate the boardwalk and be known around the globe for its July 4th eating competition.  

But before Nathan’s, there was Fort Wayne’s Famous Coney Island, opened in 1914 by three immigrants from Greece. It has stayed remarkably the same ever since, through wartime, economic slumps, cultural shifts, and a revitalization of downtown Fort Wayne. When Todoron, who started working as a dishwasher there in 1987, finally began accepting credit cards in 2014, it was considered in some quarters a disastrous concession to modernity.   

Surely this unchanging nature is partially responsible for how beloved Fort Wayne’s Famous Coney Island is in Fort Wayne. “Everybody goes there. If not regularly, then eventually,” says longtime local news reporter Nancy Nall Derringer. “Kids love it. People bring six or a dozen to parties. It’s just a universal food solvent.”  

By far the shop’s busiest time is Christmas, when citizens who have moved elsewhere return, jonesing for a taste of home. “I honestly feel like the restaurant belongs to the city,” Todoron told National Geographic. “I kind of just manage it for them.” 

Fort Wayne’s Famous Coney Island’s dogs are closest in style to ones found in nearby Detroit, which are topped with a sloppy Joe-like sauce: “A lot of people get confused when they come from other places,” says Todoron. “It’s not a chili. It’s not thick. It’s just a flavorful thinner meat sauce.” 

The result is a hot dog as different from what you would find in Chicago, a mere 160 miles away, as coffee and whiskey. There, you’d get your wiener on a poppy seed bun, topped with a veritable horn of plenty: mustard, onion, relish, sport peppers, celery salt, pickles and more. In the Southwest your Sonoran dog comes wrapped in bacon and piled with pinto beans. Elsewhere, your hot dog could come topped with anything from canned sweet corn to coleslaw.

Perhaps the most American thing about the hot dog is its ability to accommodate every diverse influence that comes its way, while remaining essentially itself. 

“Somehow hot dogs have resisted being homogenized,” says artist Hawk Krall, who has been immortalizing regional styles of hot dogs in bright, cartoonish paintings since 2009. “You go into a burger place anywhere and you pretty much know what you’re going to get. In hot dogs, you get layers like, ‘This is a Scranton version of a Michigan Texas Wiener, that was never in Texas and maybe never in Michigan but they changed it and now it’s in Scranton….” Krall is currently working on a map that charts hundreds of hot-dog stands and as many as 10 styles in Pennsylvania alone. 

Perhaps no one will ever settle on why a hot dog is called a hot dog, or who created it. But the more interesting question is a metaphysical one: Given its infinite diversity, when does a hot dog stop being a hot dog at all?

What, you may start to wonder, if the hot dog is less a specific food at all and more of a framework, a set of agreed upon ideas, with space for all manner of disagreement and variation but bound by a common faith in what we believe is delicious.

When you put it that way, it kind of sounds like a nation.