Welcome to Roadside Hot Dog Heaven

"See this guy?" says Peter Caizzo, owner of Frankie's and Waterbury, Connecticut's Hot Dog King. "He's been here more times then he's got hair on his head!" He gestures at a middle-aged man with the fading remnants of a shiner around his eye. The man bends his lovingly pomaded coif towards me, then laughs and finishes dressing his two "long dogs" before taking the cardboard carrier into his car. Frankie's has no tables, which means the only two dining options are sitting in a car or standing in the hot sun. I opt for the sun, eating in front of a copyright-infringing mural of Disney's Seven Dwarves enjoying footlongs.

There's a strange artifice constructed around roadside food, born of American car-culture fetishization and exacerbated by shows like Diners, Drive-ins and Dives, as if the only reason to eat at places like this is to participate in some nostalgic 1950s-revival theme park. And for sure, the kitschy signs at Frankie's, which include a 22-foot long wiener reading "WORLD FAMOUS HOT DOGS" on top of the building play into this odd sentimentality. ("I bought from a place that was closing down in South Carolina!" Peter says. "It cost $970 to ship it UPS!") But though Frankie's is doing brisk business, I don't see a ton of people engaging with some imagined, long-past America. There's a Fed-Ex guy. A girl's soccer team. A biker in a leather vest struggling with melting soft serve. A real estate agent who shakes his head and tells me, "I travel all over. It's hard to get a good hot dog in this state." The clientele are regulars—working people and families eating a cheap lunch. The appeal of Frankie's isn't that it's a cliché. In its details, it doesn't represent small towns of yesteryear. It represents this specific small town, today.

Frankie's is my second dog of the day on a trail of Connecticut's cheap, inland roadside restaurants. We started a few miles down Route 8 at Al's of Naugatuck—nicknamed "Rubber City" for the days when Naugahyde, the ersatz leather of the typical thrift store couch, was manufactured there. Both Frankie's and Al's use Hummel-brand long dogs that poke out, red-rocketesque, from toasted, top-loading buns. The dog at Al's is grilled a little crisper and the chopped homemade relish is spicy, whereas the proprietary relish at Frankie's is viscous and floral and, along with the buttered bun, brings out the sweetness in the Hummel's beef/pork blend. What's most important, though, is that both dogs are cheap—under $4—and big enough to serve as a close-to-complete meal (especially if you categorize sauerkraut and relish as vegetables) for as little money as possible.

Route 8 was one of the original New England Interstates, built in the 1920s to connect the industrial towns of southwestern Connecticut to those of Western Massachusetts. Now, the road is lined with billboards hawking discount cremation, school bus driving lessons, and Trump. At night, the illuminated cross in the center of Holy Land USA, a long-abandoned Christian amusement park, still glows over the town. In this part of the state, many of Connecticut's classic roadside hot dog joints were established before the 1956 Highway Act (which authorized the construction of the Interstate highway system) and never retooled to appeal to new traffic. That's because most of their customers aren't tourists; as Rick, the manager of Blackie's in Cheshire, explained to me, they're locals, brought as kids by their parents, who were brought by their parents, who, in some cases, ate Blackie's dogs on their first dates.

Halfway between Waterbury ("Brass City") and Meriden ("Silver City"), Blackie's is housed in an octagonal, barnlike structure that began life as a filling station. The words "NO DANCING" are painted over one window. A "large" birch beer is served in a Dixie cup scarcely bigger than the ones your grandmother keeps in a dispenser her bathroom. As at Frankie's, the esoteric details are what typify it. Blackie's has been run by the same Irish family since its inception, and shuts its doors once a week to comply with the Roman Catholic prohibition of meat on Fridays. ("We clean for eight hours," Rick says.) The Martin Rosol dogs are great, poached in oil so that the skins burst, not so violently as a deep-fried New Jersey "ripper" but gently untwisting, lending more surface area to be covered in spicy homemade mustard and relish. The correct way to order, so you know, is to simply say the number of hot dogs you want, i.e., "Let me get two." My friend and I order incorrectly, prompting a round of good-natured (I think) mockery from the diverse patrons at the full counter.

Connecticut's an easy state to stereotype, especially because a lot of people have only seen the state as a highway through a car window on their way somewhere else. The cliché is that it's the Eastern seaboard's flyover country, a suburban wasteland full of malls, sprawl, bratty white teenagers driving luxury cars, lacrosse, and insurance. This is not entirely incorrect. Lots of the truisms of the modern suburb may have originally described Greenwich, Stamford, and the like, which I-95 put within easy reach of New York City and the metropolises of New England.

But go a few miles west, and it seems like a different state. I-84 and I-91, the other two major interstates that run through the center of Connecticut, are short routes that cross in Hartford but don't directly connect any other major cities. Neither road seems all that essential until you realize that a major function of the interstates, besides moving commuters, was to efficiently transport military goods and troops. Most inland Connecticut towns aren't wealthy, and they're not satellites of major urban centers, despite their geographic proximity; they're tiny Galapagos islands, evolving with their own quirks and culture, often bearing nicknames that commemorate industries whose better days have passed. Many have been stagnant or declining in both population and wealth for years.

It's even more apparent that these roadside restaurants aren't intended as nostalgia when we park in the huge, empty East Hartford parking of lot Augie and Ray's Drive-In, in the shadow of the huger, empty parking lot of Pratt and Whitney, the airplane engine manufacturer that's been open since the 1920s and is by far the city's largest employer. I-84, I-384, I-91, and CT-2 were woven together in an unholy knot nearby. Augie and Ray's, which began serving Pratt and Whitney's factory workers just after World War II, has a checkered history—it used to be owned by the aptly named William "Hot Dog" Grant, a suspected mob informant who vanished in 1988, his body never recovered. The restaurant could do a decent tourist trade nonetheless—on our visit, there's a huge gang of weekend bikers gassing up at the Shell station across the street—but the restaurant's insularity is further illustrated by its hours of business. We're there on a Sunday, and it's closed. It's scheduled to reopen at 5:30 AM, just prior to the factory's Monday morning shift.

We have more luck at Capitol Lunch, a cafeteria-style restaurant on a stretch of Main Street in New Britain ("Hardware City"). Little else is open on the block, giving the impression that the place has a forcefield protecting it while the rest of the city crumbles. A Capitol Lunch dog is distinguished by its "Famous Sauce," a dark and meaty concoction with a unique flavor somewhere between sloppy joes and an unspicy jerk sauce, served over the dogs in huge spoonfuls. I guess that the secret ingredient is allspice; my friend guesses some kind of offal, like beef hearts. Gus Ververis, one of the owners, isn't telling. "People guess all kinds of things—liver, coffee grounds," he says. "You either love it or you hate it. Sometimes when people come here for the first time, they say, 'How are you guys still open?'"

Lots more spots to get a decent dog are scattered around the state, from the bucolic seasonal shacks like Harry's Place in Colchester or Clamp's in New Milford, where the dogs are overshadowed by burgers and onion rings, to newer places like The Bethel Hot Dog Palace, which serves a New York-style Sabrett dog on an strangely powdery bun in an unsavory backyard. A lot of them don't seem like they're worth a trip from too far away, but maybe if you grew up in Hat City or Thread City or Clock City or Silk City there'd be some small detail at your local dog joint that would draw you back.

Unlike nostalgia, a visceral memory means you were there. Gus at Capitol Lunch tells me of hearing about ex-New Britainites meeting each other far from home and bonding over his restaurant. In these stories, even Capitol Lunch's Famous Sauce is just a detail, not the point, which maybe is the point. "They might not have met each other before," he says, "but the smell and the taste of this store would come up as a reminder, as something in common."

Then he shrugs and says, "But that's New Britain. If you grew up eating Blackie's, you'd probably remember a Blackie's dog."