“Where can you still get a good, old-fashioned frankfurter?” Nathan and his grandson Lloyd Handwerker.
CONEY ISLAND IN the aftermath of a hot dog contest deflates like a party balloon.
At the 2015 Nathan’s Famous International Hot Dog Eating Contest, a relative newcomer, twenty-three-year-old Matt “the Megatoad” Stonie, beats out perennial winner Joey “Jaws” Chestnut by downing sixty-two dogs to Joey’s sixty. Just to put those numbers in perspective, a distant third contestant manages only thirty-five and a half.
For the occasion, Nathan’s Famous president and COO Wayne Norbitz announces the company will donate one hundred thousand of its signature all-beef hot dogs to the Food Bank for New York City.
Looking around Coney Island that day, I sense a decline in the excitement about the contest. Maybe it’s because the amazing Takeru Kobayashi isn’t here, a champion who voluntarily absented himself six years ago over a squabble with the organizers. But perhaps there’s a chance that the new Stonie-Chestnut rivalry will revitalize the event.
Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. I find it hard to let go of the idea that something real, something vital of the past was lost when my grandfather and people like him left the scene. The generational mythology goes something like this. We’ll never see the likes of Nathan Handwerker again. The golden age has passed, replaced with corporate sponsors and televised binge-fests.
In the go-go atmosphere of the present day, my sentimental attachment to the way Nathan’s Famous used to be seems irrelevant. People have always wished for “the good old days.” Right now, immigrants all over America work just as hard as my grandfather ever did. The country has experienced incredible surges of innovation since the so-called Greatest Generation retired from the stage.
The Nathan’s Famous is nowadays more of a licensing business. Consumers get to know the name from the supermarket, the movie theater, and the convenience store, from ball games and from the eating contest. Nathan’s Famous now sells potato chips, mustard, and barbecue sauce, among other products.
There are several different types of Nathan’s Famous frankfurters available at most grocery stores, including the “Coney Island Original,” with natural casing, just like the old days. Simply in terms of satisfying the greatest number people with the most hot dogs, the modern, retooled, corporate-owned version of the Nathan’s Famous frankfurter is the all-time winner.
Or at least a contender. With $71 million in 2014 sales, Nathan’s Famous ranks as the fifth-most popular hot dog in America, behind four other brands: Vienna Beef, Kunzler & Company, Oscar Mayer, and Ball Park Franks.
Most of the franks consumed today—$700 million worth—are purchased at retail stores, not hot dog stands. The vast majority of frankfurters sold in the modern era have a standardized shape and appearance. They are almost always skinless, and thus, snap-less.
Some of the archival footage I used in my documentary film shows Nathan’s Famous frankfurters in their glorious, Technicolor prime. The fat, glistening sausages rest in their buns, offering themselves up to that first juicy bite.
These marvels were the direct result of one man’s will to excel, to be ever watchful, to devote himself to the proposition that quality can be gained and maintained only by ceaseless, unflagging effort. He insisted. He worked. He was always there. Compromise was the enemy. Laziness and the untoasted bun were sins.
Jiro Dreams of Sushi is another documentary film with a subject similar to my own—it’s about a small restaurant, a rigorous master, and a father-son relationship. The Japanese philosophy of shokunin kishitsu (“spirit of the craft”) is central to sushi chef Jiro Ono’s success. The question posed by shokunin kishitsu is simple: How can we do the same thing day after day, year in and year out, with no loss of focus, no compromise on quality, no lessening of the energy that we bring to the task?
Sushi or frankfurters or filmmaking or writing or just plain old getting up in the morning, it doesn’t much matter. How do we bring our best to it? How do we not, as the slang phrase goes, “sleep on life”?
My grandfather had a less fancy version of shokunin kishitsu: “Everything is common sense.”
I remember going to the post-Nathan, corporate-run Nathan’s Famous in Coney Island during the nineties, the old original store, now updated. With me were a couple of old-time employees, Hy Brown and Felix Vasquez. They noticed a change in the layout right away. Whereas in their day, the grills were up against the front counter and the cash registers were behind the server, now a row of cash registers faced toward the customers, and the grills were in back.
A subtle difference. The move was no doubt dictated by some efficiency expert schooled in time-motion studies, or perhaps board of health rules imposed with the thought that reaching directly over the food to serve the customers could be dangerous or unsanitary. But to me—and to Hy Brown and Felix Vasquez—the change symbolized a switch in philosophy. Money first, indicated the new arrangement. Food later.
Another change: The griddles were no longer heated by natural gas. Gone was the former method of increasing and decreasing the gas-fired flames to respond to demand. Electric griddles are much less easy to adjust. The cooks had only limited control over how cooked the franks were.
We sampled the fare. Hy Brown dug into an order of Nathan’s Famous fried potatoes.
“Oh, my gosh. They are really not cooked enough,” he said. “They should be browner and crisper. See, you can see the oil here and the oil on my fingers. That’s a little too much oil. Either the oil’s not hot enough or they didn’t leave it in long enough.”
“Nathan’s turning in his grave,” Felix added.
Does it matter? On both sides of us, customers crowded at the counters to place their orders. It wasn’t the classic crush of the old-time Nathan’s Famous, but the place was doing a steady business nonetheless. The modern Coney Island store racks up $8 million in annual sales. Who cared if the potatoes were sometimes not cut fresh at the store, that they were served soggy?
But there are voices crying in the wilderness. Complaints and laments on Internet message boards and online reviews: “In my day…”; “It used to be…”; “I remember…”
Maybe no one at the current-day Nathan’s Famous notices. Or perhaps it is worth a few points of profit to the corporate owners—and the shareholders they are beholden to—that the workers do not heat the oil sufficiently or that they lessen the cooking time. Maybe it cuts a few pennies from the store’s electric bill.
More likely, the expertise and attention to detail aren’t there. Nathan-style vigilance is similar to the lost art of the medieval stone mason or the Italian Renaissance plasterer. Shokunin kishitsu? Spirit of the craft? What the hell is that?
Wandering among the weary thousands who showed up for the hot dog contest and are now trailing home, I run into a Coney Island old-timer, Joe Sciammetta, who worked the carnival rides and boardwalk during the sixties.
“I worked on the Tornado back in those days. I remember going to Nathan’s there, the hot dog might’ve been, around thirty-five or fifty cents at that time?”
He gets more and more excited with each word.
“So I go to Sammy, I go, give me five hot dogs. The guy was quick. Before you know it you had five on the plate, the little cardboard plate, right? Mustard, everything on it, boom, he had the big tongs. You were in, you were out.”
He shakes his head. “Now you go into Nathan’s, I’m not gonna lie to you, it’s not the same service. The quality of the hot dog ain’t the same. I think it was a different grade hot dog. Something about that old grill, maybe, gave it the taste. The toasted bun, which they don’t do anymore. That made it delicious.”
He gestures toward the busy store on Surf Avenue.
“I can’t even go there anymore. Even if there’s two people ahead of me, it’s like having twenty people ahead of me ’cause it takes forever. It’s so frustrating. It’s Nathan’s, but it’s not Nathan’s.”
“Okay, Joe,” I say. “So where do you go these days for a hot dog? Where can you still get a good, old-fashioned frankfurter?”
“Oh, I can’t go now, but I’ll tell you how to get there.”
He suggests a nearby Russian delicatessen. When I track down the place, sure enough, long linked strings of fat, beautiful frankfurters rest in a glass-fronted display case. The store has some of the franks cooking on an aluminum foil–covered grill.
I indicate the franks to the shop lady.
“Can I get one of those?”
“What do you want on it?” she asks.
“Just mustard, nothing else.”
She prepares the hot dog and serves me. I’ve fallen into a sort of time travel daze and don’t dare ask for an order of crinkle-cut fries, with the crispy bits still in the bottom of the cellophane bag.
“How much?”
“A nickel,” she says.
I’m kidding. She doesn’t say that. But the price is less than a Nathan’s Famous dog today.
The smell of the frank is intoxicating. I don’t want to break the spell, but finally I bite down.
Snap!