How Hot Dogs Accidentally Became the Most American Food

Rolf’s at Christmas feels like you’re eating in an advent calendar. The festive decorations in the Manhattan German restaurant bloom like mold across the walls and ceilings. You will be made cozy whether you like it or not, and you’ll eat like it, too. The last time I went, in winter, I scanned the German menu and came upon one that the restaurant described as a delicately spiced and smoked pork and beef sausage with the meat in a fine mince. It sounded good and somewhat familiar. Of course it did. Because when my dinner arrived, I realized, despite the lack of a bun, I’d ordered hot dogs.  

Like most Americans, I associate hot dogs with being hot and outside. They are the food of baseball games and boardwalks, camping trips, and emergency dinners on the sidewalk. They are summer in a way no other summer food is. A hamburger is found at a backyard grill, sure, but also at McDonald’s year-round. Potato salad is in tubs at the grocery store. There’s the seasonality of corn, but corn is in everything. Meanwhile, between Memorial Day and Labor Day, what the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council calls “peak hot dog season,” Americans consume around seven billion hot dogs.

Why? Sitting in a cozy Manhattan restaurant on a winter’s day, I could no longer ignore the incongruity of the association. This was sausage, heavy and salty and leaking fatty juices, completely at home with mashed potatoes and a glass of mulled wine. It seemed ridiculous that this is something I’m told to reach for in the summer — you mean when I have boob sweat?? 

Hot dogs became a summer food through a series of accidents and another series of explicit marketing decisions, turning the food’s casual association with warm days into a requirement for celebrating both summer and the concept of freedom. And like with many American things, the people most responsible for the success of both the hot dog and its association with summer are mostly immigrants. 

There’s no shortage of apocryphal stories about who first called a Frankfurt sausage in a bun a “hot dog,” or who decided to serve it in a bun in the first place, and ultimately, it doesn’t matter. The hot dog began its life in America with waves of German and Eastern European immigrants in the mid-19th century, opening delicatessens and selling imported (and later domestically made) sausages on the streets of major cities. This is perhaps the first moment hot dogs become a fine-weather food. “It's got to be a good day if you're out there slinging dogs to the public,” says Farideh Sadeghin, author of The Hot Dog Cookbook.

But hot dogs begin to be associated with summer days because of the twin powers of baseball and Coney Island. “I believe [the hot dog] began its great vogue at Coney Island where it gradually converted the addicts of the entirely native clam chowder to its charms,” wrote Henry Collins Brown in 1928 in In The Golden Nineties, a recollection of New York in the 1890s, before the unification of the city. Coney Island started as a resort in the 1830s, as new bridges to the peninsula allowed residents of New York City to enjoy a nearby beach. In 1867, Charles Feltman sold hot dogs from a cart at Coney Island and eventually opened a restaurant, Feltman’s German Gardens.

In 1919, the Stillwell Avenue Terminal opened at Coney Island, allowing the resort town to be accessible by subway. This led to a boom in tourism, especially during the summer, and hot dog sellers were ready. By that time, Polish immigrant and Feltman employee Nathan Handwerker had quit and started his own hot dog restaurant, Nathan’s, right across from the new subway terminal. You couldn’t reach the beach without smelling hot dogs first.

Baseball, whose roots sprouted into the leagues we know today in the 1850s, had already claimed its place as a summer pastime by that point. By the nature of a sport that required a lot of space and a lot of open air for a ball to go flying, the game had to be played outdoors. That meant playing day games when it was warm enough for people to spend nine innings outside. The National Hot Dog and Sausage Council credits German immigrant and St. Louis Browns owner Chris Von de Ahe with being the first to sell sausages at a ball game in 1893, by which the game was already being called “America’s pastime.” Then again, others credit Harry Stevens for starting the trend at New York Giants games at the Polo Grounds. Either way, they went great with the cheap beer that began to be more ubiquitous across games.

Both the public beach and baseball were leisure activities for the middle and working classes, and hot dogs were crucially cheap. They were also something that was difficult to make at home. At the time, there was still some craft to their production, and buying them for home consumption required going to the meat market for their specific version. It also required living near a German or Eastern European butcher; if your butcher was Italian, you weren’t getting hot dogs. Those cases carried salsiccia.

But the thing that really made the hot dog a summer food was the ability to cook it oneself, which required mass production. The industrial revolution made pre-packaged meat easier to access, a product of the supermarket rather than the local butcher. And by the 1960s, the development of artificial sausage casings meant hot dog and sausage production was no longer tied to “the limited supply of animal casings” (aka, their own intestines). This allowed for the mass production and packaging of hot dogs on a national scale. “It’s the rise of cookouts after World War II, suburban backyard culture really took off,” says Sadeghin. No longer were you searching for hot dogs from a street cart or a boardwalk vendor — you could grill them up on your own lawn.

“Any tradition gaslights you into thinking this is how it's always been,” says Jamie Loftus, author of Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs. “America’s most successful export is marketing, and the hot dog is a part of that.” The hot dog may have naturally shown up where people went to enjoy their summer, but making it the food of the summer required intention. It required a story. 

One company that knew this was Oscar Mayer, founded by a German immigrant who opened a meat market in Chicago in 1883, and which went on to become one of the largest producers of hot dogs in the country. “Oscar Mayer spent decades of our parents' childhood trying to associate hot dogs with not just America, but with American children,” says Loftus. Ads of children marching in the street, sitting outside in backward baseball caps, hanging out with Foghorn Leghorn in the middle of the day, and, of course, the Wienermobile, which every kid dreamed of driving one day. 

The subtext is they are not at school. They’re on summer vacation, a childhood experience that evokes almost a steroid-powered nostalgia (and itself more of an early 20th-century development). It is not just that you could cook your own hot dogs on your backyard grill, but that this is what your parents would do for you during your summer break, when you had not a responsibility or care. “Associating hot dogs with American childhood, there's a way to make a lifelong customer,” says Loftus. “It's basically the Disney model for processed food.”

Hot dogs were firmly a summer food by the mid-20th century. But making them the food of July Fourth required another act of storytelling and mythmaking. “Legend has it that on July 4, 1916, four immigrants gathered at the very first Nathan’s Famous hot dog stand in Coney Island and made eating-contest history,” writes Nathan’s on its website. “As the story goes, they were competing to see who was the most patriotic.” There’s no citation for this, no photo of four guys standing around with their hot dogs and an American flag. In fact, Mortimer Matz, who worked publicity for Nathan’s in the 1970s, told the New York Times, “In Coney Island pitchman style, we made it up.” But the image it evokes sets a stage. You’re thinking this is how it’s always been. You’re thinking, if you want to celebrate July Fourth, this is what you have to do. Matz, who died in 2025 at age 100, is credited with co-founding the hot dog-eating contest.

The first recorded Nathan’s hot dog eating contest occurred in 1972. “They created the hot dog contest for Nathan's to get a quick photo in the paper,” says George Shea, chairman of Major League Eating and the host of the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating contest since 1991. “In 1972 they did it on Memorial Day, which makes as much sense because it kicks off the grilling season.” The next year, it was moved to July Fourth, though 1979’s The Contest Book, a compendium of strange contests one can enter, co-authored by, incredibly, Ruth Reichl, says the contest would also take place on Memorial Day and Labor Day.

But it mostly stayed a local oddity, with a few dozen people showing up every year to watch a table of untrained men stuff their faces on their way to the beach, easily overshadowed by the pleasures of the Wonder Wheel or the nearby sideshow. By 1984, the record was fourteen hot dogs, with a prize of a Nathan’s gift certificate, the kind of thing any small-town celebration might host. When Shea took over, he knew he wanted to make it a bigger spectacle, which required a new narrative. 

“I talked about the contest as a litmus test of patriotism and the defining moment of the Fourth of July,” he says. “We just hammered that.” Shea’s showmanship and knack for creating spectacle began to draw more crowds, but the contest wouldn’t have become what it did without another immigrant, Takeru Kobayashi. In 2001, he won by eating 50 hot dogs in 12 minutes, twice as many as his closest competitor. Suddenly, the hot dog eating contest was a national story. “Indeed, when competitive eating went mainstream thanks to ESPN in 2004, it was the slight Japanese wonder who captured the world's imagination,” wrote the International Business Times in 2012. “How could such a small man eat so many hot dogs?” The contest (and the many like it that exist around the country) became inextricable from the celebration of the nation’s independence. There was no July Fourth without hot dogs.

“I think that the reason we associate hot dogs with America is because there are so many companies that were started in America that really have a vested interest in making them a part of our national identity,” says Loftus. That assimilation has been the suggested goal of all immigrants — get yourself into the melting pot. And that can work for some. At this point, Oscar Mayer is as American as anyone else. And “the contest has assumed a place in our culture that rises above anything,” says Shea. He names reigning champion Joey Chestnut as the “hero,” but the “contest itself is part of the holiday.”

But Kobayashi, despite being the person who solidified the association between hot dogs and July Fourth for so many, never got the “American hero” treatment. That went to Chestnut, his white American competitor. In 2019’s “The Good, The Bad, and The Hungry,” ESPN’s 30 for 30 episode about the hot dog-eating contest, Kobayashi notes that when he lost to Chestnut in 2007, the crowd began chanting “USA,” as if he wasn’t part of it. “You can’t be an American hero because you aren’t American,” said Shea in the episode. Later, it cuts to Kobayashi: “I thought that where you come from and your race had nothing to do with it.”

July Fourth is a myth, a story we tell ourselves of our own excellence, of how being free is how we’ve always been. But that day is not when Americans gained independence. For some, that's represented by Juneteenth, or Day of Remembrance. For those in our concentration camps, that date has yet to come. On the country’s 250th anniversary, we watch daily as “freedom” encompasses fewer and fewer people, limiting who is thought of as American.

The hot dog is not an American food. It didn’t start here, and it’s not ending here. Across the country, there are regional variations, from the Mexican-originated Sonoran dog popular in Arizona to the reindeer dogs of Alaska. Sadeghin notes that Norwegians eat about 450 million hot dogs a year, and that they are associated with the country’s independence day on May 17. “South Americans and Scandinavians really love a hot dog, arguably more than Americans,” she says. Sure, American imperialism may have catalyzed this, but the hot dog is a requirement for Filipino spaghetti, Peruvian salchipapas, Korean corn dogs, and Chinese flower buns. The symbol of American independence, of summer and vacation, and freedom, is also one of international innovation. Fitting, then, that Nathan’s Famous was acquired in 2026 by Smithfield, which itself was purchased by WH Group in 2013. It is now based in Hong Kong.