It might be a hoagie town, but Philly’s hot dog scene is coming into its own

Summer is the slow season for Philly restaurants. In May, as the staff at Royal Tavern thought about ways to boost business, Toronto-born chef Nic Macri turned to a food he loves but finds lacking in Philly: hot dogs. The chef-turned-butcher decided to make them from scratch and offer up a handful of preparations each week for the month of July, from a bacon-wrapped Texas Tommy to a Greek dog topped with tzatziki, red onion, tomato, and cucumber.

When The Inquirer visited Royal Tavern to film Macri making dogs, he ballparked that they might sell a couple hundred hot dogs a week. With half the neighborhood down the Shore, “200 a week would be a really successful program,” he said.

» READ MORE: Where to get the best hot dogs in Philly, the suburbs, and the Shore

In the end, the Bella Vista bar has gone through roughly 1,000 hot dogs a week.

Royal Tavern’s blockbuster Dog Days of Summer isn’t the only reason to think our inveterate cheesesteak-and-hoagie town might be coming around (again) on hot dogs. Several bars put them on their menus after the Phillies announced the demise of Dollar Dog Night this spring. In May, a hot dog specialist opened in the Fashion District mall; a completely different one is on the way in Haddonfield. And in Northern Liberties, two dog developments are emerging: a newly styled “hot dog bar” at a familiar club and a forthcoming sausage shop from the owner of El Camino Real.

It may be hot dog summer, but look closer and you’ll find a rich, if downplayed, history of frankfurters in the Philadelphia area, from the smokehouse at Rieker’s Prime Meats in Fox Chase to the flattop griddle at Jimmy John’s Pipin’ Hot Sandwiches in West Chester.

Talk to transplants from hot dog metropolises (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago) and they’ll tell you: Philly’s just not a hot dog town. Hell, the rest of Pennsylvania does a better job than we do. That’s according to Chris Barnes, co-owner of Lucky’s Last Chance, who celebrated his birthday this year with a tour of Allentown-area hot dog shops, followed by a trip to Scranton’s pair of century-old Texas Wiener shops. “I love Philly, but I would love to see a much bigger hot dog scene in Philadelphia,” Barnes says.

Lucky’s is best known for its two-handed burgers, but it was originally intended as a hot dog joint — an ode to the roadside stands Barnes frequented growing up in Connecticut. “It was road trip-inspired, with a lot of that New England coastline [fare], and the only thing we were really missing was fried clams and lobster rolls.”

When they were first opening their Manayunk bar in 2011, Barnes and his partners scoured the area for top-split rolls — the easy-to-butter bread-slice-style buns used for lobster rolls — but consistently came up empty, so they decided to debut without hot dogs. Only later did they hit the menu, after Barnes finagled a weekly top-split trade between two Bimbo bakery drivers with intersecting routes in upstate New York.

“[One of the drivers] would bring [the rolls] down to us, and we would buy them out of the back of his car. It was the dumbest thing in the world, but it was so worth it,” Barnes remembers. The rolls are “a difference maker,” he says.

Years later, fluffy top-split rolls — no longer bootlegged — still cradle Lucky’s “second-place dogs” (named for the time the bar lost in an erstwhile annual hot dog competition on South Street to “an osso bucco dog that would have cost $30″). The Dietz & Watson dogs are flash-fried and grilled and come topped in various ingredients: chili, pulled pork, cheese, etc. They sell well, but burgers rule the day at all three Lucky’s locations. “The hot dogs are a passion project,” Barnes says.

You could say the same of the handful of hot dog iterations on the menu at Radin’s Delicatessen in Cherry Hill: a plain dog, a Chicago dog, a bagel dog, a pastrami-topped dog, and a supersized pig in a blanket.

Hot dogs are one of owner Russ Cowan’s go-to meals when he’s dining in there. But he grants that Philadelphians really don’t expect a Jewish deli to serve hot dogs — unlike his experience growing up in New York. “Every one of my family’s delicatessens had a hot dog grill in the window, and that is just not the case in Philly,” he says.

Radin’s various sausages and all-beef (but nonkosher) dogs come from Vienna Beef. Cowan ran distribution centers for the Chicago-based company decades ago before he transitioned to the deli game, so he knows firsthand that it’s top-shelf. “It’s good stuff and it’s expensive,” Cowan says of the Vienna Beef dogs, which go for $8.50 and up at the Cherry Hill deli. (Radin’s house-made buns and bagels factor into that price, too.)

Cowan is skeptical hot dogs will ever gain a foothold here. Like Barnes, he remembers some of Philly’s hot dog vendors of yore — especially Levis, the Sixth Street shop that originated Philly’s hot dog-fish cake combo in the early 1900s. Levis had a 96-year run under various owners before it died a slow, staccato death starting in 1991: A franchise reboot went south in the ’90s while a 2012 revival of the original concept fizzled out by 2017 — around the time several other dog specialists went bust, including Hot Diggity, Underdogs, Moe’s Hot Dog House, and the decades-old Texas Wieners at Broad and Snyder.

“People love hot dogs, but there don’t seem to be enough of them,” Levis’ last owner told The Inquirer.

Cowan has a different take. “I don’t think people appreciate a quality product in Philly when it comes to hot dogs,” he says. “Sometimes people look at hot dogs, you know, ‘Oh, it shouldn’t be an expensive food.’ They think it’s worth $3 off of a push cart,” Cowan says. “But good stuff, like everything else, costs money.”

A hot dog worth shelling out for should hit on all cylinders: chewy but not rubbery, smoky, savory, and not quite sausage-sized but substantial. Arguably the most important quality is the snap — a great dog delivers tension in every bite.

But there’s a reason people think hot dogs should be cheap. At worst, they’re lumped in with mystery meat — finely ground who-knows-what stuffed it into a tube.

That impression isn’t totally false. “As long as the ratio of lean to fat is fine, you can ‘hide’ anything in it,” Royal Tavern’s Macri says. “If you’re a big meat-processing facility and you have a bunch of crap you want to get rid of, this is the good way to do it.”

Macri cautions that some bad apples — or dogs, in this case — shouldn’t spoil the bunch. “There’s different versions of everything,” he says. “There’s artisan bread and there’s white bread.”

Macri insists hot dogs have rules, and they do. According to USDA regulations, a dog can be made from beef, pork, turkey, chicken, or a combination of all four. There’s a ceiling on fat content, as well as “nonmeat binders and extenders.” Makers can use natural (usually lamb) or artificial (usually collagen or cellulose) casings. They can also strip the casing for a “skinless dog.” The label must specify ingredients, so there should be little mystery to the meat. And no matter what, by the end of the process, the dog must be smoked and/or cooked. This is true of frankfurters, wieners, and bolognas, too. Some may quibble, but to the U.S. government, they’re all “cooked sausages” and they’re all the same.

For his own dogs, Macri uses pork shoulder and beef short rib that’s trimmed, diced, and frozen before it’s ground, chilled, and put in a processor called a Buffalo chopper. When schooling Royal Tavern’s cooks on the recipe, Macri coaches: “If you wouldn’t eat [the meat] on a kebab or by itself, then it doesn’t make it in.” (”House-made hot dogs and house-made charcuterie are the same thing!” Macri noted on Royal’s Instagram.)

Still, even a high-quality hot dog bears a superficial similarity to the cheap frank. That’s because of how they’re made: Whether it’s processed in a home kitchen or a factory, the meat is finely ground, then emulsified with water and spices to form a homogenous paste. (Emulsification blends ingredients that don’t usually mix — think mayonnaise or vinaigrette.)

What sets hot dogs apart from sausages, wursts, and kielbasa is that perfectly smooth meat paste. “It does look like pink slime,” says El Camino Real’s Owen Kamihira, who has been making hot dogs from scratch for 22 years.

Emulsifying binds the lean meat, fat, water, and salt together, forming long protein chains. Those chains create a dog’s trademark texture: “The emulsification gives it the snap,” Kamihira says. “It is not great-looking. But just prior to that, it’s nice big chunks of [meat].”

Once whipped, the meat is stuffed into a casing. In a factory, this is all automated. Macri does the job with a squeaky hand-cranked sausage stuffer. The lamb casings he uses are more expensive, adding up to almost a dollar per pound, but they build on the dogs’ inherent snap. (Most of Royal’s dogs sell for $7.)

“Hot dogs are definitely one of those things that make more sense on an industrial level than they do on an artisan level,” Macri says. That’s clear: After he forms a rope of stuffed meat, he links it one by one — measuring out a length against a knife, then pinching and twirling it to form a single dog. He pricks each with a special tool to tease out air pockets. “I’m probably a little more tedious about this than the average person,” Macri says. Before he’s through, he’ll let the dogs dry overnight, then smoke them over applewood.

As you might expect, there aren’t too many folks routinely making hot dogs by hand in Philly. Owen Kamihira is another of them. He is a sausage enthusiast, but he holds his hot dog recipe, developed over 20 years, in highest esteem. “I would put this hot dog against not only any other hot dog, I’ll put it up against any sausage,” he says.

Kamihira makes the rotating smoked sausages served at El Camino Real, including a recent mesmerizing chicken hot link spiced with Korean chilies, but he considers his hot dogs too pricey for the Tex-Mex restaurant. Instead, you can try his plump pups — seasoned with nutmeg and coriander, smoked with oak or cherry — in Le Caveau’s French hot dog for $10 a pop, or you can occasionally buy them through Small World Seafood. Kamihira is a partner in Superette, Le Caveau’s forthcoming sister spot on East Passyunk Avenue; he wants to stock his dogs and sausages at the market/bottle shop/wine bar. He’s also planning to open Joe & Kay’s Quality Meats, a smoked meats emporium, next door to Joe & Kay — Kamihira and sons’ izakaya, which is on the way in Northern Liberties.

“Ultimately I want to become the Sausage King of Philadelphia,” he says.

To do that, Kamihira will have to take on Rieker’s Prime Meats in Fox Chase, which has been turning out dozens of sausage varieties since 1972. Second-generation owner Marcus Rieker learned to make traditional German wieners when he was a tween. He and the rest of the staff here still follow his father Walter’s original recipe, albeit with less salt.

Rieker tells a story about when his father initially opened up the German meat market. A salesman came around peddling ingredients, including popular hot dog additives like soy (for color and flavor) and milk powder, which adds weight and plumps up when cooked. Walter Rieker balked when the salesman asked him how much of the fillers he wanted to order. “I don’t want any,” he told the salesman.

”The guy’s like, ‘Oh, you’ll go out of business in a month. ... This is what goes in a hot dog,’” Marcus Rieker says. “[My dad] never put that in hot dogs before. So it’s kind of an old joke. ‘We’ll just use meat, water, and seasoning,’ like the old way he learned in Germany.”

That’s still the formula today. Rieker’s uses bull meat (“very lean but very flavorful”) plus a 50:50 lean-to-fat blend of beef trimmings, pork butt, granulated onion, paprika, and garlic powder. The sausage-makers here prep an 80-pound batch roughly every other day. The wieners are a modest part of Rieker’s meat repertoire, which spans from knackwurst and smoked Hungarian sausage to 12 kinds of bologna and Texas hot sausage.

The kitchen is equipped accordingly, with a cabinet-sized Buffalo chopper, a hydraulic piston-powered sausage stuffer, and a stainless-steel smokehouse as big as a walk-in closet, where the wieners go to dry after they’re stuffed and linked. There, they’re blasted with hickory smoke to develop flavor and color. After 90 minutes, they’re submerged in 170°F water for 12 minutes, then plunged into an icy tub before being hung again.

Rieker offers a still-warm wiener straight from the ice bath. It’s snappy, firm, and pleasantly smoky — a high-end hot dog steal at roughly $1.60 per 8-inch wiener. You won’t find these in restaurants; they’re only for retail at the Fox Chase market. Rieker’s isn’t USDA-inspected, so it can’t wholesale. Rieker says he’d need to invest in a full-on factory to meet federal regulations. “I’ve been messing around with that idea for 10 years. That step seems like a lot,” he says. More likely, he’ll open a second location once his two sons finish school; they’re both interested in the business.

“Means I can’t retire,” Rieker laughs.

For restaurateurs buying mass-produced hot dogs, finding the right frank can be a process in its own right. Fox and Son’s owner Rebecca Foxman says she and her partners tried out 50 hot dog brands before opening their fancy corn dog stand in Reading Terminal Market in 2017. They wanted a dog that would provide the perfect salty-spicy counterpart to their sweet corn bread batter. They considered “texture, flavor, snappiness or not snappiness, skinless or not skinless — it’s kind of how it all works as one in a perfect bite,” Foxman says.

Even after years of success using Dietz & Watson for their corn dogs — battered, fried, and topped to order — Foxman is perpetually on the hunt for improvement. She recently switched to Berks hot dogs, from Reading, Pa., after she discovered them while consulting on another hot dog project (Haddonfield’s Haute Dog, which will serve Danish-style hot dogs). “The flavor and texture just seems to be a little more premium and satisfying,” she says.

Snap and satisfaction convinced Ortlieb’s owner Kyle Costill to go with Snap-O-Razzo hot dogs when overhauling the food menu at the longtime Northern Liberties watering hole/venue. For years, Ortlieb’s staffers assembled tacos in a closet-sized kitchen between the bar and the backroom stage. During the pandemic, they dabbled with selling hot dogs from their takeout window; they loved it. So when a chef left this spring, rather than train a new hire on their wonky setup, they decided to pivot — and possibly stand out: “There’s no hot dog bar in Philly,” Costill says. “Why don’t we become the hot dog bar? We’re going for it.”

This spring, the Ortlieb’s team sampled its way through several dogs before landing on Snap-O-Razzos, a relatively new-to-market dog from a Nevada-based company. The dogs were pricier than local options, but Costill was sold by the overall eating experience.

“An hour later, I didn’t remember I ate a hot dog. I just remember being so satisfied,” Costill says.

At the recently opened Little Hot Dog Wagon in the Fashion District mall, owner Dawn Demry serves up Sabretts — familiar from New York City’s hot dog carts. “All the rest of [the brands] just don’t cut it for me,” Demry said. She drove down cases of them from New York or New Jersey before she found a local warehouse that would stock them for her.

Demry seasons the dogs with black pepper, garlic, and onion powder as she grills them. (Simmered ”dirty [water] dogs,” as she calls them, are available upon insistence.) She serves them on buttered brioche buns with an array of toppings, most commonly her signature, all-purpose kraut, which “is both sweet and zesty.”

Demry launched her business in New York City, where she recently catered a 1,000-guest event to celebrate Times Square’s 65-foot hot dog sculpture. She grants that Philadelphians don’t match that enthusiasm, but “believe it or not, there are a lot of hot dog lovers in Philly,” Demry says. “I know this because I get the ‘thank you’ daily: ‘Thank you for being here.’”

Food truck owner Robin Carine found that out a different way. He and business partner Christian Albright hadn’t planned on offering hot dogs when they took over a longtime West Philly truck, now dubbed A Truck Called Sandoz, last year. But “after the first month or so, we were asked by everyone who walked past, week in week out, like, ‘Oh, do you guys have hot dogs or hot sausages?’” Carine says. “It just started to seem stupid not to have some on hand.”

They started stocking Hebrew Nationals and Liscio’s buns, but added a snazzier option after a professional baker in the neighborhood, Emily Wilson, approached them about using her soft pretzels as sandwich buns. “Once we were playing around with that, the sausages and hot dogs were pretty much a no-brainer,” Carine says. The chewy split-pretzel upgrade costs extra, but the $6 butterflied hot dog sandwich is well worth it.

“It doesn’t get more [Pennsylvania] German than that, with some sauerkraut and pretzel and wiener,” Carine says.

Twenty miles west, at Jimmy John’s Pipin’ Hot Sandwiches — a roadside landmark on Wilmington Pike since 1940 — manager Roger Steward keeps it old-school. Jimmy John’s sells about $1,200 worth of frankfurters (”the old-fashioned kind”) each week, many of them topped with chili, cheese, and bacon, not to mention the serve-yourself sauerkraut. But Steward makes a case for simplicity. “When they’re covering it in pickles, relish, onions, it’s a salad on roll with a skinny little — you’re not really eating a hot dog. You’re eating all the other stuff,” Steward says. “If you can put one stripe of mustard on it and it’s delicious, what more do you need?”

In summertime, Jimmy John’s moves tons of their custom-made Dietz & Watson dogs as takeaway — whether frozen in 5-pound boxes or fresh in eight-packs (conveniently sold with an eight-pack of buns). But the business’ hands-down busiest time of year falls between Thanksgiving and Christmas. “December, it’s crazy,” Steward says. “We get tons of people that have moved out of the area, and they come back and they say, ‘I love this place. This reminds me of my childhood.’”

Down the Shore, at Maui’s Dog House in North Wildwood, it’s the inverse: During the height of the summer, the 60-seat restaurant serves some 600 customers on weekdays, a thousand a day on weekends.

Owner Mike “Maui” D’Antuono holds down the fort with his wife, Liz, and their two daughters. They maintain a grueling schedule from May to September, coming in at 7 a.m. to start the prep for hand-cut fries, beer-soaked kraut, candied jalapeño relish, sautéed onions (“You always get a good cry in the morning”), and more. Every Liscio’s roll is split by hand, every dog carefully constructed. “Your condiment always goes on first. The mustard is the glue that holds the toppings,” D’Antuono says.

Service starts at 11 a.m. and ends at 8 p.m., but by the time they’re done cleaning up and counting the drawer, it’s 10 o’clock. That’s why the business is strictly seasonal. “If you do the hours, you’re working the full year, just cramming it down,” he says.

Before opening Maui’s, D’Antuono worked as a chef at the Hyatt in Maui and the Lobster Shack in Wildwood. After a while, he says, he got tired of making other people money. So he and Liz converted an old ice cream shack into a gourmet hot dog joint that would allow D’Antuono to channel his skills into an affordable format, applying house-made toppings to custom Hofmann hot dogs made with beef, pork, and veal.

D’Antuono remembers facing skeptics when they opened in 1999. “Many people told me, ‘You’ll never make it. This is a cheesesteak town.’” Twenty-five years of business has proved them wrong, and D’Antuono has devoted customers to thank.

“Hot dog people, they dance to their own beat,” he says. He knows because he’s one of them. “If you’re making a living selling hot dogs, it’s a passion. It’s a way of life.”