The Street Vendor Who Sleeps In His Van To Protect His Turf

Dan Rossi sells hot dogs in the most coveted spot for a street vendor in all of New York City – outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He’s been in this location for nearly twenty years, and he’s spent much of that time fighting politicians, public health officials, the NYPD, the Met, and other vendors to hold on to his precious location. In recent years he’s taken to sleeping in his van next to the spot, to be sure nobody takes it.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Pashman?

  As we turn to fall and the weather starts to cool down, I think of things like crunching leaves. I think of sharing from the sidelines of a soccer game, walking the dog in the woods. And when I think of doing all those things, I'm usually wearing something from LL Bean. Whether it's my puffer vest, my puffer coat, my scarf, whatever you're doing outside this year, you probably need something from LL Bean. Whether it's their boots, their Scotch plaid flannel, their rugged field coat, or more. Grab the layers and people you love and get outside. Visit llbean.com to shop the fall collection. LL Bean, be an outsider. As someone who has been lucky enough to go to Napa Valley, I can tell you, it's everything people say it is. Beautiful scenery, quaint, beautiful towns, and phenomenal food and

• 0:44Dan Pashman?

  drink everywhere you go. I don't even know that much about wine, but I know that every glass of wine I had in Napa Valley was excellent. I mean, there's no bad glass of wine and no bad meal. Choose between hundreds of wineries, tasting rooms, and chef-led restaurants from a low-key lunch on a vineyard terrace to a full tasting menu paired by the winemaker. Plan your trip at visitnapavalley.com.

• 1:09Dan Pashman?

  All right, Dan. Set the scene. Where are we?

• 1:12Speaker 01

  Well, right now, we're right in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 82nd and 50th Manhattan.

• 1:17Dan Pashman?

  And what are we doing here? What are you doing here?

• 1:19Speaker 01

  Well, I'm a hot dog vendor, and my carts are right here.

• 1:22Dan Pashman?

  Now, it's my understanding, Dan, that this spot right here where you have your hot dog cart in front of the Met is the best spot in New York City for a hot dog vendor.

• 1:32Speaker 01

  It's the most recognized spot.

• 1:34Dan Pashman?

  Okay.

• 1:34Speaker 01

  This has got the notoriety because at one time, the gentleman who was here, he had carts on both sides of the steps, and it was like a $300,000 contract he went into.

• 1:45Dan Pashman?

  So someone paid $300,000?

• 1:47Speaker 01

  For these locations.

• 1:48Dan Pashman?

  For these locations. What do you pay?

• 1:50Speaker 01

  Nothing.

• 1:58Dan Pashman?

  This is The Sporkful. It's not for foodies, it's for eaters. I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people. Walk down almost any block in New York City, and pretty soon you'll see a street food vendor of some kind, whether they're selling hot dogs and pretzels, plastic cups of fresh fruit out of a cooler, or falafel and kebabs out of a halal cart. There are over 20,000 street food vendors in New York City, mostly in Manhattan and Queens. And street vending's been a big part of the city's fabric since before it was called New York. It's long been a path to upward mobility for new immigrants. Iconic foods like pizza and bagels were commonly sold on the street 100 years ago. But for about as long as it's been going on, street vending has also been a hot-button

• 2:41Dan Pashman?

  political issue. All the fights over the years have led to a ton of rules, but those rules seem to be enforced inconsistently, if at all.

• 2:51Dan Pashman?

  Today, we'll meet Dan Rossi, who's been in the hot dog vending business for nearly a half-century, earning the nickname "The Hot Dog King of New York."

• 3:00Speaker 01

  Pretty much everybody knows me now.

• 3:05Dan Pashman?

  For the last 20 years, Dan's been vending in what The New York Times once described as "the most coveted location for selling a hot dog in New York," the strip of pavement directly in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which gets nearly 5,000 visitors a day. So when people come out of the front door of the Met-

• 3:21Speaker 01

  They see us.

• 3:21Dan Pashman?

  That's right. Dan first rolled his cart onto the Met Plaza in 2007. Since then, he's had to fight politicians, public health officials, the NYPD, the Met, and other vendors to hold on to his precious spot. In fact, the competition between vendors is so fierce that he's implemented a sort of round-the-clock surveillance system.

• 3:40Speaker 01

  I'll be here the night.

• 3:42Dan Pashman?

  Seven nights a week.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  Seven nights a week. Once in a blue moon, I gotta be in a bed. I gotta be honest with you. I gotta be in a bed, because I can't even stretch out in the damn van, you know? But if this is what I have to do, I do it. It's no big deal to me.

• 3:56Dan Pashman?

  Yes, most nights, Dan sleeps upright in the passenger seat of his van, which he keeps parked in front of the museum to make sure no one takes his cart or his spot.

• 4:07Dan Pashman?

  Dan is 75. He was born and raised in the Bronx, the second youngest of four boys in a big Italian family. Out of everyone, he was closest to his grandma, who he says kept a jug of wine with her at all times. Dan and his brothers and cousins helped make that wine in the basement of the railroad-style apartment he grew up in.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  The grandchildren, we'd be squeezing the wine, you know? And when they got out, we would get drunk. Everything was down there. We, you know, pasta. We would do everything. The way you do it is you lay the pasta on board, and my grandmother would do it. It would be enough for months. We would make food for months.

• 4:41Dan Pashman?

  In 1967, just before his 18th birthday, Dan enlisted in the Marines. And you were sent to Vietnam. What inspired you to enlist?

• 4:48Speaker 01

  Well, I didn't want to finish high school. I didn't want it. I hated it, you know? But my mother insisted, and I said, "Okay, for you, I'm going to graduate." I mean, my thing was, when you graduate, you go to the service, you get out, you find a girl, find a job, and that's it. That's all you do in life. And I think I went to the Corps because my father was in the Corps. And, believe me, I had no clue, really, of what I was getting into until the first day. Then I knew what I had gotten into. But I loved it, you know? And you said, "They sent me to Vietnam." They sent me to Vietnam because I volunteered. And when I got there, I came back a second time, and if I hadn't gotten hurt, I would have been a third time.

• 5:27Dan Pashman?

  Two months before the end of his second tour, Dan got injured on base in Da Nang. He was repairing a helicopter that had been hitched to the back of a tractor when he slipped and caught both his legs between the wheel and the fender. The injury gave him permanent nerve damage and was serious enough that the doctor told him his fighting days were over.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  You know, I was in a lot of combat, but I never got hurt. And then something stupid got me hurt, and one thing led to another, and they said, "You're getting out of here," and that was the end of it.

• 5:52Dan Pashman?

  So, 1970, you're honorably discharged. You come back home.

• 5:56Speaker 01

  Come back to garbage, because this whole place hated us. Everybody, it was just an atmosphere in the country, I guess. That we women wanted. You know, it was only that. You come back and, and, and when you're in something, like when you're in an attack and buckets or mortars come in, you react in a certain way. And when it's over, it's over. You know, we picked up bodies and then put them away and then we went back to sleep. It was like nothing. When I came back, all that comes back to you. You know, you don't want it to come, you bury it. And that was a hard thing, you know? So I started drinking. That was a bad thing.

• 6:41Dan Pashman?

  Dan spent the next few years trying to readjust to civilian life. He worked odd jobs, night shifts at a construction site, laundromat installations, and he slowly pulled himself together. He met his future wife Angela, and now they have four daughters. Eventually, Dan got an apprenticeship at a sheet metal factory in New Jersey. One day, a coworker asked him to build him a hot dog cart. This guy had recently suffered a heart attack. He wanted to quit his job in the factory and sell hot dogs. That was his retirement plan. So Dan built him the cart. But then the coworker recovered and decided not to quit, so he didn't need the cart anymore.

• 7:13Speaker 01

  And he stuck me with it. So we put it in an ad in the paper. First guy who saw it said, "Don't show this to nobody. I'm going to get the money. Don't, don't show it to nobody." My wife got excited. So I said, "You know what? Let's see what this is. Let me build another cart." Soon as I built it, I sold it. I built it, I sold it. I built it. I said, "Holy moly."

• 7:36Dan Pashman?

  Dan knew he was on to something. He decided to go all in. In 1980, he started his own push cart manufacturing company and hired a few other Vietnam vets to work at his shop. In their first year, he says he and his guys built and sold about 200 carts.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  When we started building, the only thing we actually built was the small ice cream carts and those small, little hot dog carts.

• 7:55Dan Pashman?

  Nowadays, most vendor carts are big enough that they need to be towed by cars, but these old school ones could literally be pushed down the street. It was basically a little steel box on wheels with an umbrella. It typically had one compartment for hot dogs, one for buns, and maybe one more area to heat up pretzels. So Dan's cart building business was going great. But then, New York City passed a law that capped the number of mobile food vendor permits in circulation. Before that, permits were unlimited. Now, with the freeze, demand for new push carts plummeted.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  I was just building carts and being happy as hell. And they just, that was like shutting the door. So I had to go get permits.

• 8:30Dan Pashman?

  Dan kept his business afloat by buying companies that had lots of permits. That way, his carts could come with permits, making them more valuable. By 1990, Dan had 499 mobile food vending permits, 16% of all the ones in the city.

• 8:45Speaker 01

  I would lease the cart with the permit, five bucks a day. When you have hundreds of them, it adds up.

• 8:51Dan Pashman?

  So at the peak, around 1990, you had 499 permits? And it was reported that at that peak time, you were making about a million dollars a year?

• 9:01Speaker 01

  The company grossed over a million a year. Gross, that's the company.

• 9:04Dan Pashman?

  Right.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  But now, you gotta build the carts. You got the overhead. I mean, you gotta pay your employees. It sounded like a lot of money, but, you know, I'll be honest with you, I made about 200,000 a year. That's it.

• 9:16Dan Pashman?

  But you were doing all right.

• 9:18Speaker 01

  I was doing great. I was happy as hell.

• 9:20Dan Pashman?

  You bought a house in Greenwich, Connecticut?

• 9:22Speaker 01

  Bought a house in Greenwich.

• 9:22Dan Pashman?

  Very wealthy neighborhood, six-acre property. Like, you were doing okay at that time.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  Did great. And I didn't worry about paying my bills. My kids were in private school. My oldest daughter was in college. My second one was gonna get ready to go to college. I mean, we had it okay. I still went to work every day. The only good thing that I got personally was I bought a car. That was it. And every Saturday, I would take my wife out to dinner. Something we always wanted, and that was it. But as far as anything else, there was no showboating and nothing like that. I was still me.

• 9:54Dan Pashman?

  Dan had turned his little operation into an empire. A profile in the New York Times dubbed him "the king of push carts." But things were changing politically in New York in ways that would profoundly affect Dan's business.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  I'll place a much greater emphasis on stricter enforcement of the law to reverse the growing trend of ever-increasing tolerance for lawless behavior.

• 10:15Speaker 02

  Jaywalking is a fact of life here. No more, says Mayor Giuliani.

• 10:19Speaker 03

  In general, you're trying to civilize New York. We're working on it.

• 10:23Dan Pashman?

  In 1994, newly-elected Mayor Rudy Giuliani launched his "Quality of Life" campaign, aimed at "cleaning up" New York City's streets. And he made food vendors a prime target, saying they clogged streets and sidewalks. Giuliani said it was a public health and safety issue, and he had a well-known ally in his effort.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  You would hear on the radio this guy whining. About the streets look like they're Bangladesh and all this. It was Donald Trump.

• 10:50Dan Pashman?

  Trump complained about vendors outside his newly constructed Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue. Dan says a lot of those vendors were immigrants and disabled veterans. He didn't like street vendors. He didn't want people in the street.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  He didn't want us in the street.

• 11:02Dan Pashman?

  As I said at the start, there have been efforts to ban street vending in New York City for about as long as New Yorkers have vended, which dates back centuries. But in the 1990s, the Giuliani administration was determined to crack down. First, they restricted where in the city vendors could go, taking away a lot of prime real estate.

• 11:18Speaker 04

  The city's street vendor review panel has approved a number of proposals that would ban food and other vendors from 144 blocks in Manhattan, including parts of the financial district and Times Square. Many of the complaints from business improvement districts say the street sellers caused congestion.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  They shut almost 100 streets in Midtown.

• 11:37Dan Pashman?

  Then the hammer really dropped. As part of the crackdown, the city passed a law that said nobody could own more than one permit. Giuliani said this would, quote, "restore the city's vending industry to what it was intended to be, a business of small independent entrepreneurs." But for Dan, whose business was built on leasing push carts with permits...

• 11:55Speaker 01

  That was the end.

• 11:57Dan Pashman?

  So basically overnight, you had to go from 499 permits to one.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, and we had to shut down. It was hard. It was really bad.

• 12:05Dan Pashman?

  Dan was forced to declare bankruptcy, and the home he'd purchased in Connecticut just a few years before was foreclosed on. He and his wife were left living in a rented van.

• 12:13Speaker 01

  Nowhere to go. We had nowhere to go.

• 12:20Dan Pashman?

  Now, if you ask Dan, he'll tell you that everything that happened to the mobile food vending industry in the 80s and 90s was all a conspiracy to take him down. As a guy with a lot of permits, he did exemplify one of the problems the mayor's office said they were trying to solve: an ownership concentration in the industry.

• 12:35Speaker 01

  I own 499 permits. I'm the big bad guy. You gotta knock me down.

• 12:40Dan Pashman?

  Dan considered suing the city to get his permits back. But around this time, his wife developed some health problems.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  I told my wife, I says, "You know, we got a few bucks in the bank, and we could walk away from all this." And she says, "Who are you talking to?" She says, "You're not gonna allow them to do this to us. You're gonna fight." I said, "They're gonna take our shoes." She said, "Let them take our shoes." And they did. But it had a tremendous effect on our health. You know, there's no question that what I did caused her to have a stroke. There's no question in my mind.

• 13:11Dan Pashman?

  So Dan did fight. Once his wife was in better shape, he sued the city several times over the next few years. But all his complaints were dismissed. In one suit, the judge ruled that the city was not targeting Dan unfairly or enforcing rules differently than they were against other vendors. He was never able to recover all those permits.

• 13:31Dan Pashman?

  Coming up, Dan tries to claw his way back into the vending game. With help from an obscure law that dates to the Civil War.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  I still got one permit they left me. I said, you know what? I'm gonna sell hot dogs.

• 13:43Dan Pashman?

  But it doesn't sound like that was the end of the troubles.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  That was just the beginning. That was the beginning.

• 13:49Dan Pashman?

  Stick around.

• 13:57Speaker 05

  Time to cook up some advertisements.

• 14:02Dan Pashman?

  As we turn to fall and the weather starts to cool down, I think of things like crunching leaves. I think of sharing from the sidelines of a soccer game, walking the dog in the woods. And when I think of doing all those things, I'm usually wearing something from LL Bean. Whether it's my puffer vest, my puffer coat, my scarf. Whatever you're doing outside this year, you probably need something from LL Bean. Whether it's their boots, their Scotch plaid flannel, their rugged field coat, or more. Grab the layers and people you love and get outside. Visit llbean.com to shop the fall collection. LL Bean, be an outsider. Start the day strong with Quaker Protein Products. Quaker makes it easy and delicious to get a good source of protein. No matter what the day has in store, Quaker Protein Products give you a variety of ways

• 14:46Dan Pashman?

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• 15:31Speaker 06

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• 15:57Speaker 04

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• 16:05Dan Pashman?

  Welcome back to The Sporkful. I'm Dan Pashman and I have hot dogs on the brain. And it's not just because of this episode. Fourth of July weekend's coming up, and this Friday, we have another really fun show about hot dogs. It's about two legendary hot dog joints, one in Detroit, one in New Jersey, both of them over 100 years old. Back in the 1920s, Red Hots in Detroit catered to thousands of hungry workers at the Ford plant, serving chili and Coney Island dogs, a Detroit specialty. But they've had to get creative to stay afloat in recent years. Then we go to my home state of New Jersey, where Rutt's Hut is famous for, get this, deep-fried hot dogs known as Rippers. This place is very special to me, and in the episode, there's even a cameo from my parents. My mom told me a story about the time she and my dad came to Rutt's Hut after she had been in the hospital.

• 16:48Speaker 04

  And we stopped here afterwards for a hot dog because it was sort of like a treat. Like some people suffer an ice cream cone. We went into this stand and started eating my hot dog and I didn't feel right. I thought I was going to pass out. So dad walked me to the car and told me to put my head, and I put my head down, and I'm waiting, and I think he's going to come around to the other side of the car and get in. I'm waiting, I'm waiting, and finally I look up, he's not there. He went back in to finish my hot dog.

• 17:22Dan Pashman?

  This episode is one of my all-time favorites and it's gonna be this Friday's reheat, so I want to make sure you check it out. In other recent reheats, we've nerded out on the science of carbonation and had a thoughtful conversation with Nigella Lawson, so I hope you'll check all those recent releases out. Okay, back to Dan Rossi. After New York City stripped him of all but one of his 499 street vending permits, he lost everything. He felt like he failed his family. He went back to working odd jobs and eventually saved up enough money to rent an apartment for him and his wife. Then, one summer day in 2007...

• 17:53Speaker 01

  I get a phone call from a disabled vet. He's in trouble. He sells the t-shirts and stuff. He says, "Dan, I'm in front of the Met." He says, "And what they did was, right here, they put one of the little Cushman vehicles where he had his spot. He was selling right here."

• 18:08Dan Pashman?

  Dan gestures to the spot we're standing in now.

• 18:10Speaker 01

  And they put it there to get him out.

• 18:12Dan Pashman?

  The NYPD had parked a vehicle where the vet was trying to sell t-shirts to deter him from vending in front of the museum. Hearing that enraged Dan. More than a decade had passed since the city took his permits, but his feeling of injustice was still fresh. The vet that called him for help packed up his stuff that day and never came back. But it gave Dan an idea.

• 18:31Speaker 01

  I said, "You know what? I still got one permit they left me. I'm gonna sell hot dogs. And I don't have to pay anything."

• 18:39Dan Pashman?

  That's true, and the reason dates back to a very old law.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  It came about a few years after the Civil War, and there was nothing for them.

• 18:47Dan Pashman?

  For the veterans.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  They were in bad shape. So, a federal law came down mandating that every state must come up with something for the vets so that they can work. And New York came up with this, where any disabled veteran can work on any street, you know, not just selling food. If you want to hawk newspapers, they can't stop you from doing it.

• 19:07Dan Pashman?

  Regular vendors can't sell outside the Met without paying a huge extra fee because it's considered part of a park. But a disabled vet can sell there for free, thanks to this old law. So Dan had found a loophole. The next day, he returned with his permit and a hot dog cart.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  When I came, I didn't come here. I took the cart down to 79th Street.

• 19:27Dan Pashman?

  That's a few blocks down from the Met. Still a park area, but with less foot traffic.

• 19:31Speaker 01

  I didn't want to start any trouble. I wanted to just, things were really bad for me. I was trying to get back on my feet. And naturally, they came and they started to harass me, the cops in the parks. And they started writing me tickets. And I said, "Look, guys, leave me alone. You guys just don't want trouble with me." They came, and every time they came, I said, "Okay." I'm talking two, three times a day. "Next time you come, I move 10 feet closer to the center." I said, "All right, just keep talking," I said. And when I got here, I said, "Now what are you gonna do?" They arrested me.

• 20:02Dan Pashman?

  The charges were eventually dropped.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  And the beauty of that was, that when I came back the next day, nobody bothered me. I knew I was right. And from that day on, I'm here.

• 20:14Dan Pashman?

  As a disabled vet, Dan has the right to sell hot dogs smack dab in the middle of the Met Plaza. And now that he has his spot, he's not leaving it for anything, even if it means sleeping in his van every night.

• 20:25Speaker 01

  Well, this is survival now. We don't work. We don't eat. And I know what homeless is now, to be homeless. It's not gonna happen to my wife again. It's not gonna happen.

• 20:34Dan Pashman?

  But even sleeping by his spot hasn't stopped city health officials and the NYPD from harassing, ticketing, and arresting him. Dan even spent a night in jail in 2009 for refusing to move his cart.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  Every year for the last four years, not this year so far, but the last four years, they would come and shut me down for some reason. Scraped off my decals, put a stop work notice on there, and never was I ever found in violation of anything.

• 20:59Dan Pashman?

  The irony, Dan says, is he's the only one actually following the law around here. On the day we met up to talk, there were nine other food vendors in front of the Met. A coffee cart, a couple of halal carts, a truck selling bubble tea. And you're telling me everyone in this block, except for you, shouldn't be here?

• 21:14Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 21:15Dan Pashman?

  When Dan started setting up in front of the Met, it encouraged other vendors to follow suit, even if they weren't run by disabled veterans.

• 21:22Speaker 01

  Cops started to come. And what these street vendors would do is they would find a veteran, they call him a rent-a-vet. That was the term that they got. You know, "Give me $100, I'll sit by your car all day."

• 21:34Dan Pashman?

  That way, they can claim that the law protects them.

• 21:36Speaker 01

  They can claim that it's a vet, you know? They're here now. There's a dozen of them right in front of us.

• 21:45Dan Pashman?

  According to a report from the Immigration Research Initiative, three-quarters of mobile food vendors in New York City today are operating illegally. Not by using vets, but simply by vending without permits. The reason is that it's virtually impossible to get a permit today because of that cap put in place back in the 80s. It's led to a black market, where permit holders lease permits to vendors at exorbitant rates. We're talking tens of thousands of dollars for a permit that the city sells for 200. So for most would-be vendors just trying to scrape by, it makes more sense to skip the permit and take their chances on the street. But that's an increasingly big risk. It can lead to fines of up to $1,000. And many of those vending without permits are undocumented immigrants, which means

• 22:27Dan Pashman?

  if they do get busted, they could face deportation. In the past few years, enforcement has been on the rise.

• 22:33Speaker 06

  And for the second time in a matter of days, a woman selling churros in a subway station detained by New York cops.

• 22:39Speaker 07

  The NYPD Commissioner made a special trip here today after his cops issued eight summonses and seized a lot of property from these vendors. They want to get permits and licenses, but argue the system works against them.

• 22:52Dan Pashman?

  In a statement, Mayor Eric Adams said, "Street vendors are vital to the city, but that unregulated street vending is a quality of life concern." Twice as many tickets were issued to vendors last year versus the year before. And since Trump took office and made mass deportations a priority, some New York City food vendors have stopped working. A package of bills currently before the city council would try to address these issues by decriminalizing vending, making more permits available, and reducing some of the risks of deportation. Advocates are hoping the bills will go to a vote this summer. As for Dan Rossi, these days, he's mostly focused on selling hot dogs. Since he's gotten back on his feet, back in the game, he says he's making about $50,000 a year after expenses.

• 23:36Dan Pashman?

  That's working nearly every single day of the year. Vending is a seasonal business, so these are the months that really count. But so far this spring...

• 23:45Speaker 01

  It's going to be a really tough one for us this year. Because I don't, even though you see a lot of people... There's no lines. We used to have lines on the car going up the steps. Those days are all gone.

• 23:55Dan Pashman?

  Because there's so many other vendors here?

• 23:57Speaker 01

  Because there are the vendors and the climate of the city now. If you can't feel that there's friction, that there's something wrong with what's going on in the country right now. There's no tourism. Tourism is way down, you know? I had someone from France come the other day. I said, "Why would you even come here? The guy's insulting everybody." She said, "You're right. We don't like this guy." So they're not coming. Canada's not coming. I mean, everybody that... Chinese are not here. Chinese were the greatest thing we ever had. They're not here. I mean,

• 24:27Speaker 01

  come on, that's our customer base. They're not here.

• 24:30Dan Pashman?

  Now that Dan and I had covered his story and the issues vendors face, it was time to get down to brass tacks. What's the secret to a great hot dog?

• 24:38Speaker 01

  Oh, the hot dogs that we sell, we use a flat grill.

• 24:42Dan Pashman?

  So it's not, it's not sitting in the boiling water?

• 24:45Speaker 01

  Don't even say water.

• 24:48Speaker 01

  The combination of the, of the best hot dog we can find on the grill, and knowing how to cook it. You know, you don't burn it, you do it right. That's the secret.

• 24:56Dan Pashman?

  What's the brand of hot dog?

• 24:57Speaker 01

  Kirkland. Costco brand. I passed by this brand for years. I wouldn't even look at it. Until one day, we picked it up, and that was it. Then when the customers started coming.

• 25:09Dan Pashman?

  Ketchup or mustard?

• 25:10Speaker 01

  Oh, always mustard. I shiver when they say ketchup.

• 25:14Dan Pashman?

  See, I'm a combo. I like both. I like them together.

• 25:16Speaker 01

  Well, a lot of people like them both.

• 25:18Dan Pashman?

  Um, final question, Dan. Can I get two hot dogs?

• 25:22Speaker 01

  You can have two hot dogs all you want.

• 25:23Dan Pashman?

  All right. I'm ready to order a couple.

• 25:25Speaker 01

  Good.

• 25:28Dan Pashman?

  All right. First bite of the hot dog. Mmm. That is phenomenal. And you know what? Cooking it on the griddle makes a big difference. And this is also just the right amount of ketchup and mustard. Some of them overdo it. I don't want to drown my hot dog.

• 25:45Dan Pashman?

  Is it that good? It's really good. Your expression is... You might want to get two.

• 26:36Dan Pashman?

  That's Dan Rossi, the hot dog king of New York. If you want to meet him and try his hot dogs, you know where to find him, right in front of the Met. This Friday, we're continuing our 4th of July coverage of Hot Dogs with a reheat of our classic episode, This Hot Dog Tastes Like Home. It includes a trip to Detroit for Coney Dogs and a cameo from my parents. I love this one, make sure you listen. While you wait for that episode, check out our recent show about what happened when a restaurant critic visited the famed French Laundry in Napa and had an unexpected and somewhat surreal experience with celebrity chef, Thomas Keller. That one's up now. And hey, did you know you can listen to The Sporkful on the SiriusXM app? Yes, the SiriusXM app, it has all your favorite podcasts, plus over 200 ad-free music channels

• 27:20Dan Pashman?

  curated by genre and era, plus live sports coverage. Does your podcasting app have that? And there's interviews with A-list stars and so much more. It's everything you want in a podcast app and music app, all rolled into one. And right now, Sporkful listeners can get three months free of the SiriusXM app by going to siriusxm.com/sporkful. Special thanks for this episode to Louis Pugh and the Burner Band. This episode was produced by me along with managing producer- Emma Morgenstern- and senior producer- Andres O'Hara- and producer- Grace Rubin- our engineer is- Jared O'Connell- music help from Black Label Music. The Sporkful is a production of Stitcher Studios. Our executive producer is Camille Stanley. Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.

• 27:59Speaker 02

  And I'm Brittany from Rahway, New Jersey, reminding you to eat more, eat better, eat more better.

• 28:27Speaker 05

  No two businesses run the same, so banking for your business shouldn't be one size fits all. That's why Atlantic Union Bank offers knowledgeable guidance and tailored solutions designed around your goals. Whether you're managing cash flow, moving money, or protecting your business from fraud, we make banking for your business both personal and easy. Call, visit us online at atlanticunionbank.com, or stop by one of our local branches today. Atlantic Union Bank, any way you bank.

• 28:59Speaker 05

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• 29:44Speaker 05

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