Lohmann: The artistic merits of the hot dog

Some of the artists featured at this year's Richmond Folk Festival work in song, dance or fine woods. Joey Mirabile works in mustard, onions and chili.

But then, what other ingredients would you expect a self-described "hot dog artist" to use?

You'll find Mirabile, the proprietor of Joey's Hot Dogs in Glen Allen, in the Virginia Folklife Area at this weekend's festival along the downtown riverfront. He'll be grilling dogs, chatting up customers and telling stories, as well as overseeing a hot dog-eating contest.

The Folklife Area's theme is contests — traditional competitions in everything from guitar-picking to food-related showdowns such as oyster-shucking and a Brunswick stew cook-off. So a hot dog-eating contest will fit right in.

But a hot dog guy as folk art?

Might not be as much of a reach as you think.

The Folklife Area celebrates traditional art forms, and I suppose you could debate the artistic merits of nimbly cooking, dressing and serving hundreds of hot dogs during a lunch rush, but there's no question about the rich tradition of hot dog stands in communities or the characters who run them.

"The culture of food has always been considered an important aspect of folklife," said Virginia state folklorist Jon Lohman. "Much like music or crafts, food ways speak to a connection to place, community and our past. Folklife isn't about things you can learn to do from an instructional video; it's passed down from generation to generation, learned at the feet of the masters."

That certainly describes Mirabile, who literally was born into the hot dog business.

"My mother was working behind the counter when she went into labor with me," Mirabile said of the family hot dog stand in Norfolk his mother, Geri, was running at the time. "She set my grandmother behind the counter, went and had me, then came back, got back behind the counter, and my grandma took me home. That's how it all worked."

His mother and father, Tony, built Tony's Hot Dogs into a local institution, a no-frills lunch counter where all strata of society could grab a quick dog or three, be on their way in a few minutes and have something to talk about for years to come — like the way the gruff, no-nonsense Tony, who started working a grill at age 14 in the late 1930s, served his dogs with mustard, onions and chili and would threaten to throw you out of the place if you asked for ketchup. He wouldn't have done well in charm school, but he sure could deal dogs. At his peak, Tony was serving more than 2,000 hot dogs a day, Joey Mirabile said.

In his first 18 years, Joey learned everything he needed to know about the business — including that he wanted no part of it for his life's work. He entered the world of banking and information technology and climbed the corporate ladder until he reached a point four years ago when he'd simply had enough and sought something simpler, something more fulfilling.

The tug of the family business was overpowering. Equipped with an inherent sense of how to run a hot dog stand (and with the family's secret chili recipe), he started selling hot dogs in a gas station on Ridgefield Parkway. Now, at age 48, he has moved to his own place in a strip mall on West Broad Street, on the edge of Innsbrook, and he couldn't be happier.

"I knew this business like the back of my hand," he said. "I breathed it and ate it growing up."

Coming back to it has "grounded me a lot," he said. "I've learned more about my father in the past four years that I've been doing this than I had growing up."

But keeping alive a tradition doesn't necessarily mean you have to play every note the same. Mirabile has opted for a kinder, more gentler approach than his father demonstrated.

"I've got ketchup," he said with a smile.