By Tabitha Evans Moore
Editor & Publisher

LYNCHBURG, Tenn. — I popped by Woodard’s Market in Lynchburg to buy my chihuahua some turkey hotdogs so I could trick him into taking his medicine on Wednesday when a bright yellow and green label caught my attention. “No fillers. No artificial flavors. No corn syrup,” the Nathan’s Famous hotdog’s label winked at me.

I recently began slowly transitioning to clean eating, and one of my bullseyes is swapping labels filled with chemicals I can’t pronounce to fewer ingredients, and one’s I recognize as actual food. This also extends to my puppy, and since hiding his pill in a slice of hotdogs is one of my sneakiest tricks, I snagged them.

Now, if you grew up in the South, Nathan’s might not ring the same bell it does for anyone who’s ever spent a summer in New York — or who attended college with her fair share of New Yorkers. But this hot dog is amazing and has a story worth knowing and a recipe worth trusting.

{Editor’s Note: Lynchburg Foodie is our newest series, dedicated to the food finds, makers, and flavors worth seeking out in and around Moore County. Whether it’s a century-old hot dog brand quietly sitting on a market shelf or a family selling sourdough out of a beloved local institution, we’re telling the stories behind what we eat — and why it matters where it comes from.}

In 1916, a Polish immigrant named Nathan Handwerker opened a nickel hot dog stand on Coney Island with a $300 loan and his wife Ida’s grandmother’s secret spice recipe. He was undercutting his former employer by half, selling all-beef franks at five cents when everyone else charged ten. Skeptical customers thought cheap meant suspect, so Nathan got creative — he hired men in white coats to stand around his stand eating hot dogs. People assumed they were doctors. If doctors were eating them, they had to be fine. It worked.

Word spread fast. Jimmy Durante, Cary Grant, and even Al Capone became fans. In 1939, President Franklin Roosevelt thought Nathan’s Famous good enough to serve to the King and Queen of England at Hyde Park. In 2017, Major League Baseball named them its first-ever official hot dog — a title no brand had ever held before. The little nickel stand from Coney Island had become as American as baseball itself.

What brought me back to that yellow and green label, though, wasn’t the history — it was what wasn’t on it. No fillers. No corn syrup. No ingredients that read like a chemistry exam. Just beef, water, and a spice blend that’s barely changed in over a hundred years. For someone trying to be more intentional about what goes in her body — and yes, what goes in her chihuahua’s pill pocket — that matters.

My dog got his turkey hotdog and his medicine, and I went home with a pack of Nathan’s Famous, which are gonna be great on the grill this weekend. Some foodie finds come from white-tablecloth restaurants and weekend farmers markets. Some come from a Wednesday errand at a neighborhood market on a completely ordinary afternoon.

If you plan a cookout any time soon, it might be worth a stop at Woodard’s Market located at 1415 Fayetteville Highway in Lynchburg, to snag some. •

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