You don’t need to go to Coney Island in the borough of Brooklyn, New York City to grab a famous Coney Island hot dog these days. It appears you can find them in nearly every city in the U.S. If you don’t already know, the classic coney dog, or coney, is a hot dog wrapped in a bun and topped with meat sauce. The coney dog is a bit different than a traditional chili dog because coney dogs use specific meat sauce with traditional Greek spices. no beans, and are usually topped with mustard and raw onions. Chili dogs, however, incorporate any hot dog topped with bean chili and usually also include shredded cheese. I have learned a thing or two about hot dogs. Not because I love them, but because they may be my mother’s favorite food. I stopped eating them in about seventh grade—that’s a whole different story.
Have you ever watched the annual Nathan’s Famous International Hot Dog Eating Contest held on July 4th just outside of the original Nathan’s Famous restaurant in Coney Island? It’s a 100+ year tradition that was first broadcast on ESPN in 2004. It is a competition that is quite literally hard to swallow. As the story goes, the first-ever competition was between four immigrants at the Coney Island stand on July 4th, 1916. These four wanted to settle once and for all who was the most patriotic in the bunch and they were going to determine it with a hot dog eating contest.
Joey Chestnut and Takeru “The Tsunami” Kobayashi have helped make the contest famous in recent years. According to Wikipedia, Joey Chestnut ate 70.5 hot dogs in 2025 to win the competition and holds the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest record of 76 devoured dogs. If you are wondering, that equates to about 16 pounds of food!
