Chicago, USA
United States
Chicago sits on the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan, the third-largest city in the United States and the food capital of the American Midwest. Its hot dog culture runs deeper than almost any other city's attachment to a single food. The hot dog stand, called a red hot stand locally, is as much an institution here as the elevated train or the deep-dish pizza. Hundreds of dedicated hot dog stands operate across the city and its suburbs, each one built around the same formula: Vienna Beef all-beef frankfurters, steamed buns, and the seven canonical toppings that Chicagoans call being dragged through the garden. No other American city has codified its hot dog so precisely. The tradition roots in two waves of immigration. Greek and Jewish vendors in the early twentieth century set up stands on the Near North Side and on Maxwell Street, the open-air market on the city's Near West Side where Eastern European Jewish immigrants had been selling food since the 1880s. The 1893 World's Columbian Exposition brought millions of visitors to the city and cemented the all-beef frankfurter as Chicago's default. Vienna Beef, founded that same year by two Austro-Hungarian immigrants, Emil Reichel and Samuel Ladany, supplied those stands and has supplied them ever since. During the Depression, hot dog stands multiplied because a nickel could buy a dog with fries and enough vegetables to call it a meal. That Depression-era value formula is still legible in the price and the toppings of the Chicago dog today.
