The Hot Dog

One day last week, I had lunch with a friend at the Ridgewood Country Club. A menu item caught my attention, the Grilled “Hummel Brothers” Hot Dog $8. It seemed expensive for a hot dog but it was really good. Then this week, Joanne and I went to Costco. I had a hot dog with a 20oz. soda for $1.50. Costco sold about 245.1 million hot-dog-and-soda combos worldwide in fiscal 2025. That works out to roughly 672,000 hot dogs per calendar day, or about 28,000 per hour. It got me thinking about the history of the hot dog which I will now share. I am sure you will detect AI played a major role in telling the story.

The hot dog is best understood not as one clean invention but as a marriage of old Central European sausage-making and 19th-century American street food. Its sausage ancestry is German—hence *frankfurter* and *wiener*—but the familiar portable sausage-in-a-split-bun became a distinctly American food, especially in New York.

Sausages have existed in many cultures for centuries, but the direct ancestors of the hot dog were the finely ground, seasoned sausages associated with German-speaking Europe. Frankfurters are traditionally linked to Frankfurt, Germany. Wieners take their name from Vienna—”Wien” in German. The exact origin is contested. 

These sausages were already popular well before the American hot dog arrived. German immigrants brought their food traditions—including sausages, lager, delicatessens, beer gardens, and street vending—to U.S. cities in large numbers during the 1800s.

The pivotal American innovation was making the sausage easier to eat while walking: serving it in a long, sliced roll. Charles Feltman, a German immigrant and baker, is often credited with popularizing this format at Coney Island. His company says he began selling frankfurter sausages in long buns from a converted pie cart in 1867. The Museum of the City of New York places his first Coney Island hot-dog stand in 1871. The precise year is debatable, but the broader point is solid: Coney Island helped turn the sausage-in-a-roll into a mass-market beach and amusement-park food.

The bun mattered because it replaced plates and cutlery, made the sausage less messy and easier to sell from carts, suited crowds at beaches, fairs, factories, sporting events, and city streets, and it helped make a German immigrant food feel at home in everyday American life.

The remaining questions is, where did the term “hot dog” come from? The name is much murkier than the food itself. The famous tale says sports cartoonist Tad Dorgan saw vendors selling “dachshund sausages” at a baseball game. He drew sausages as barking dachshunds in rolls, and labeled them “hot dogs” because he could not spell dachshund.

It is a good story—but historians generally treat it as unproven. The cartoon has never been located, and the expression “hot dog” was already appearing in U.S. college publications by the 1890s. The “dog” part was joking slang. Some people teased cheap sausages might contain dog meat, while the long shape also invited comparison with a dachshund. It was more a humorous, slightly skeptical nickname than a statement about what was actually in the food.

By the early 20th century, hot dogs had become firmly associated with American leisure. Several places accelerated that transition. Charles Feltman’s large restaurant operation helped establish the Coney Island seaside hot dog tradition, Later, Nathan Handwerker opened the original Nathan’s stand there in 1916.

The menu for hot dogs has varied by region:

New York | All-beef frank, mustard, sauerkraut or onion sauce |
| Chicago | Beef frank in a poppy-seed bun with mustard, neon-green relish, onion, tomato, pickle spear, sport peppers, celery salt—traditionally no ketchup |
| Coney Island | A regional family of chili-sauce dogs; the Michigan version usually includes a meat sauce, mustard, and diced onion |
| Detroit Coney | Natural-casing frank with a distinctive beef-heart-based chili sauce, mustard, and onion |
| New Jersey “Texas wiener” | A hot dog topped with spicy meat sauce, mustard, and onion; despite the name, it is a New Jersey tradition |

The hot dog succeeded because it is simple but adaptable: one food that can be a plain grilled frank with mustard, a carefully constructed Chicago dog, or a chili dog.

The story would not be complete without mentioning The Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest, an annual Independence Day spectacle held at Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York, where elite competitive eaters try to consume as many hot dogs and buns as possible in 10 minutes. The event began informally in 1916 according to Nathan’s tradition, though historians have questioned that origin story; it nonetheless became a nationally televised contest and a defining symbol of Coney Island’s exuberant summer culture. At the 2026 Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest, Joey Chestnut ate 66 hot dogs and buns in 10 minutes to win his 18th Mustard Belt at Coney Island. His all time record is 83 hot dogs.