By Joel Denker
Part III traced the journey of chili to the Middle West—e.g., the Cincinnati chili parlors founded by Macedonian and Greek immigrants.
Coney Island shops, usually Greek-owned businesses selling chili-drenched hot dogs, were springing up throughout the country. In the early 1900s, young Greek immigrants Peter Curtis and Anthony Antonakos traveled from New York to Johnstown, Pennsylvania to work as apprentices in a candy shop owned by a countryman. They opened their own candy and ice cream business in Cumberland, Maryland in 1905.
A Greek peddler from Texas visited their shop and planted a profitable idea. Alexis, the only name he was known by in family history, appeared with a “little burner on his back,” Louis Giatras, the owner of the business today, said. “He had a special sauce they could make money with.” The itinerant cooked up samples of his chili sauce over the burner. The partners took the recipe and started selling Coney Island hot dogs. The restaurant, originally named the Coney Island Lunch, and now known as the Coney Island Famous Wiener Company, is still thriving.
Paterson, New Jersey became a bastion of the Hot Texas Wiener, another variation on the Coney. Its originator, an anonymous elderly Greek, owned a lunch counter in downtown Paterson in the 1920s. Searching for ways to spice up his hot dogs, he dabbled with different chili mixes. His favorite, folklorist Timothy Lloyd points out, resembled a “Greek spaghetti sauce.” Similar to the Cincinnati chili flavoring, it played chili and cumin off against cinnamon and allspice.
A product was born that a long line of Greek-owned lunchrooms in this industrial town would merchandise. Their stock in trade, the “Hot Texas Wiener,” was fried, put in a steamed bun, and then topped with successive layers of mustard, chopped onions, and chili sauce. The “grills,” as they were known in Paterson lingo, also sold hamburgers, BLTs, and roast beef sandwiches.
New grills sprang from the old. Employees moved on to open their own businesses. William Pappas, who had worked at the original Texas Wiener business, started Libby’s Hot Grill. Libby’s, in turn, became a launching pad for more eateries. The Falls View, the Olympic, and other grills located near the textile mills that hugged the Passaic River offered cheap and filling meals to the area’s factory workers.
Detroit grew to be the capital of Coney Island Chili. Constantine “Gust” Keros, a Greek immigrant, started out in Detroit sweeping floors at the Kelsey Hayes auto company in 1910 and then drove a popcorn wagon. Gust called for his brother William, who became his partner in 1914 in a new business, the American Hat Cleaning and Shoe Shine Parlor.
Three years later, the restless businessmen launched the American Coney Island, a storefront eatery, in downtown Detroit. They sold nickel hot dogs slathered with chili to factory workers.
William left to launch his own restaurant. He set up Lafayette Chili next door to his brother’s shop and carried the same menu.
The brothers were devoted to their adopted land. They called their hot dogs “Coney Islands,” Gust’s son Chuck recalled, because “it was so American, I think. And that was their whole life.” For all their patriotism, they could not help giving their product an ethnic touch. Besides the smell of mustard and onions, their hot dogs, like Hot Texas Wieners, were fragrant with a cinnamon and allspice chili sauce.
Coney shops spread from downtown Detroit to new neighborhoods, malls, and shopping centers, and expanded to other Michigan towns. “Now there’s one on every corner,” Tony Keros, William Keros’s son, told the Detroit News. The businesses burgeoned by tapping a large supply of family members from the “other side.” After learning the craft, many embarked on their own Coney businesses. Twenty of Chuck’s cousins, who emigrated from Greece, operate Coney shops today.
Even in the heartland of chili, the Southwest, the product metamorphosed. James Coney Island Company, a 24-shop franchise headquartered in Houston, blossomed from a chili café started by two Greek immigrants, Tom and James Papadakis, in 1923. They sold chili by the bowl as well as in pint- and quart-size containers. Customers also bought frozen one-pound bricks of chili to go.
The brothers, who had disembarked at Ellis Island, sampled Coney Island hot dogs in New York City. They made the chili-laden frank the centerpiece of their business. James’s repertoire now includes New York- and Chicago-style hot dogs, Jalapeno Dogs, Polish sausage, and Fit Franks, a low-fat choice.
