10 Iconic Foods of New York City, and Where To Find Them

From: The Village Voice

1. 

Hot Dog 

Open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year

The hot dog arrived in Coney Island from either Vienna (hence, wiener) or Frankfurt (hence, frankfurter), and immediately caught on. Sold from carts, and later a storefront, by Feltman's German Gardens, the all-beef "tube steak," as it was facetiously called, went from popular to wildly popular when Polish-Jewish immigrant and Feltman's employee Nathan Handwerker took the hot dog in hand and popularized it to the world. In the modern era -- and partly due to hard times -- the weiner has become more desirable than ever, with Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest at the center of its contemporary popularity. The natural-skinned, all-beef frank is still the city standard, while most of the country suffers through inferior, puffy, mystery-meat "ballpark" franks pulled from the refrigerator case of the supermarket. Miraculously, you can still get them whence they first disembarked. 

Nathan's Famous, 1310 Surf Avenue, Brooklyn, 718-946-2705