History of the Hot Dog: From Frankfurt and Vienna to Coney Island

Frankfurter vs. wiener: two cities, one sausage

Frankfurt am Main is traditionally credited with the frankfurter. The National Hot Dog and Sausage Council notes the city says the sausage dates to 1487, and Frankfurt threw it a 500th birthday party in 1987. The Council also says plainly that the claim is disputed.

Vienna's case is about a person. Austria's agriculture ministry credits butcher Johann Georg Lahner, who trained in Frankfurt, with making the first Viennese frankfurters in 1805 in what is now the 7th district. Frankfurt butchers were limited to pork, the ministry says, while Lahner blended pork and beef into sheep casings, smoked them lightly and scalded them.

That is why the names cross over. In Vienna the sausage is still called a Frankfurter, while Germans call it a Wiener Würstchen. Our Frankfurter Würstel is the Viennese way: two slim sausages warmed in water that never boils, with mustard and a roll.

Coney Island adds the bun

Charles Feltman arrived in New York from Germany in 1856, at fifteen. According to the Coney Island History Project, he started out in 1867 pushing a pie wagon through the Coney Island dunes, leased land four years later, and grew into a block of restaurants that by the 1920s served about five million customers a year.

Feltman is generally credited with putting a hot sausage in a roll. The usual story, which the History Project itself calls legend, is that a bun saved him from handing out plates and forks. Exact dates for the first bun vary from source to source, so treat any single year with caution.

1916: Nathan's and the nickel

Nathan Handwerker, a Polish immigrant, took a job at Feltman's slicing rolls for hot dogs that sold for ten cents. In 1916, he and his wife, Ida, put $300 in savings into a small stand at Surf and Stillwell Avenues and sold hot dogs for five cents. Ida is credited with the spicy, garlicky all-beef recipe.

Half price made some customers suspicious of the meat, and the story goes that Nathan hired people dressed as doctors to eat at his counter. Accounts also say that Eddie Cantor and Jimmy Durante, then working at Feltman's, nudged him toward the stand; that detail comes from company histories and is hard to confirm. Nathan's soon overshadowed Feltman's, and our Coney Island griddled dog is inspired by it.

Then every region made its own

Once the hot dog was American, cities rebuilt it. America's Test Kitchen traces the Chicago dog to a 1929 Depression-era cart, describes Detroit's Coney Island as a natural-casing dog under a beanless chili made by Greek and Macedonian immigrants, and places the Sonoran hot dog in Hermosillo, Mexico, before it reached Tucson in the 1980s. Seattle's cream cheese dog started at a late-night Pioneer Square cart in the late 1980s.

We have more than a dozen versions in our hot dog collection, from Vienna's original to the Korean corn dog. If you have a favorite city, our Chicago vs. New York vs. Detroit debate is where to argue about it.

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