"The preferred spelling of `wiener' is w-I-e-n-e-r, although e-i is an acceptable ethnic
variant."

Martin Prince, The Simpsons

Weiner? Wiener? It is a spelling frequently contested. The former has taken hold in society, perhaps as a subconscious slight towards Germans, one of the largest producers of wieners and of genocidal house painters. The correct spelling, as Martin points out above, is w-I-e-n-e-r, but at the Hot Grill in Clifton, one can have it both ways. The sign says WORLD’S TASTIEST TEXAS WEINERS. (If I were a genuine ball-buster like my father, I might ask for documentation of that claim.) The cups say WORLD’S TASTIEST TEXAS WIENERS. The T-shirts have it both ways, and that’s what I find myself examining right now. The 35^th anniversary model – what the kids might call "vintage" – has the spelling as I-e. The current, 40^th anniversary shirts have it as e-i, perhaps a signal of the immigrant founders of the Hot Grill trying to reach out to the natives by making use of the Americanized spelling of the word, and thereby improving T-shirt sales

I’ve finished my meal – roast beef platter, soft roll, gravy on the fries – and I approach the counter one last time before leaving.

"You got any of those shirts in size small?"

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One can have it both ways at the Hot Grill, but one can also have it all the way. "All the way," for the laymen out there, means having one’s hot dog (or hamburger) with onions, mustard, and chili sauce. A confession: while their Texas wieners have earned the Hot Grill its fame, I personally don’t like them. I don’t like mustard and I don’t like onions. Also: the sauce makes the bun very soggy. I like dipping my fries in the sauce, for it is quite tasty, I just don’t like it on my hot dogs.

Apparently, I am alone in this. The Hot Grill opened in 1961 in Clifton and has long since become an institution. Celebrating the 35^th anniversary in 1996, they sold 60,000 hot dogs alone in three days, many of those ordered "all the way." Business is always bustling and, according to the thehotgrill.com, the chili sauce they prepare has traveled as far as England and Italy. Possibly apocryphal: it has been rumored that the country of Chile sent a delegate to the Hot Grill just to sample the sauce. Actually true: prior to becoming President, Richard Nixon frequented the Hot Grill. If one wondered how he spent his time between his defeat by Kennedy in 1960 and his triumph in 1968, they could find him at 669 Lexington Avenue, marshalling his strength and, very likely, passing gas.

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I can’t trace the origins of my own Hot Grill experience. To me, it’s one of those things that you can’t remember not being familiar with, like Elvis or toothpaste. Their sign, the giant neon hot dog, is tattooed on the back of my eyelids. Its luminous immensity bestrides North Jersey like a colossus. The smell of the hot dogs, too, wafts through the Clifton air and instantly reverts me to childhood, one of two scents capable of achieving that feat, the other, the addictive aroma of gasoline, which calls to mind my mother’s Cadillac warming up on a winter’s day, steeling itself to whisk my sister & I off to school.

The interior design reflects owners possessing little interest in design, but lacking a philosophy of non-design like the minimalists. So you’ll see paintings of Indian and East Asian themes, exotic images at odds with the earthiness presented by the clientele and the work staff. That same no-nonsense work-staff can be seen at the front counter, with their palms planted firmly on the countertop, impatiently waiting to take one’s order and to move the ever-present line along.

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My father, to this day, tells stories about how the behavior of my younger sister, Devon, and I got us kicked out of restaurants and forbidden to return. It would seem, then, that the Hot Grill is very permissive because we’ve been returning there for over twenty years now.

The Hot Grill has been one of the few constants in our lives. It’s served as the backdrop to the changes that our family unit has undergone. It’s seen us as a happy family; it’s served us when we did our impression of the same. It’s been there when one of us was absent: when I was living at school, and then when I came home and my sister was away at college. And then their doors were presumably open to my parents when I lived in Manhattan with my girlfriend, a vegetarian of all things, and my sister was off in Boston with friends from college confronting the real world while still trying to extend the insouciance of their life on campus. Both of us were fashioning our own lives, with varying degrees of success, in far off lands where, respectively, meat was verboten and where gravy on one’s fries was seen as alien.

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My fascination with the Hot Grill can be traced back to the process of ordering the food. Mom would run off the list uninterrupted and, at the end, the man taking the order would translate it to the kitchen staff, where memory mixed with deep fryers. Their language, an argot comprised of Greek, Italian, and broken English, was thoroughly their own. After all of these years, the only term I’ve been able to interpret is "french," whose English equivalent is quite obvious. Strawberry milkshake.

And never in any of our visits has the order been wrong. My parents, whose memories are beginning to fail them, have thought that the staff has gotten something wrong, forgotten an item, but the fault always lays at the feet of either my mother or father. Since I began going there myself, I’ve often considered asking them just how they do remember it all. Like children in the homes of foreign-speaking parents, do they learn through osmosis? Is there special training? Do they attend seminars? I’ve always relented, though, because I like having some sense of mystery and wonder in a life that’s seen illusions ranging from the Tooth Fairy to parental infallibility held up to the light of day and exposed as frauds.

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To my surprise, they did have one of the T-shirts in small. Usually when specialized T-shirts are made only one size is specified, XL or XXL or something equally unreasonable; given the size of the average Hot Grill patron, I was doubly surprised that they bothered to order small. The shirt itself sports an anthropomorphic hot dog, donned in authentic western regalia, genteelly doffing his cowboy hat, and saying, "Howdy Pardner!" His ability to speak serves as a reproach to the consumer, as if to say, "Surely you wouldn’t eat another sentient being!" The smile on his face either demonstrates that he is repressing the knowledge that he is consigned to being eaten or that he is simply oblivious to it.

The shirt was a mere $5 and I happily paid the man. During this transaction, a question that I’d been meaning to ask for ages was swelling up. A curiosity that could no longer be contained broke through to the surface. As I received my change from a $10, I blurted out:

"So how do they do it?"

"Do what?" he replied.

"You know, remember all of that stuff. You’ve never gotten my order wrong!"

"Oh, that" he laughed. "Well, it’s their job. They really can’t afford to forget."

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The other week, my sister came down to visit from Boston. When asked where she wanted to go to eat, she quickly responded, without a moment’s hesitation: "HOT GRILL!" We all went, ordered, and got a booth. Looking at the televisions positioned in the upper corners of the walls, showing CNN with the volume muted, we reflected on the times when the televisions used to show Hot Grill commercials, which always struck us odd, like preaching to the converted. While enjoying our meal, we briefed each other on the status of our lives since last we convened

Give or take a few renovations – new paint jobs, placards supporting a post-9/11 America – the setting was the same: the inexorable rush of time had little effect on the exterior of the Hot Grill. The living, on the other hand, are quite susceptible to being caught in the undertow of time – the exteriors of the family gathered at the table could probably use a little renovation, but they remained essentially recognizable to each other. In their day, the interiors have seen their share of cracks: some have grown deeper, others have seen repair. Certain corners have grown dusty from a neglect necessary to keep the foundation from caving in. So there were things left unsaid and matters that couldn’t be broached. Seated at the table that night, enjoying a rare meal together, was a family whose impersonation of the real thing, like Pinocchio, longed to be the genuine article. And it’s getting close. The pain is always just around the corner but so too, even though it seems much farther away, is all of the joy, all of that which continues to bring the family back together despite everything. To deny the hurt is to deny the human experience itself: with family, you can’t have it both ways, to omit the bad and to only remember the good. And so I’ll never forget any of it. I can’t afford to.