Feature article
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Dip Dog: Turning 50 and still going strong
By Fred Sauceman
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At the Hi-Way Drive-In, mustard is a verb.
“Mustard me one,” Grant Hall yells to his son Justin, who then grabs a brush and paints a Dip Dog.
The rock-riddled sign in the back of the parking lot announces the legal name of the business, but few people call this Lee Highway institution by its official designation. To most, it’s the Dip Dog Stand. Half a million of the battered dogs are sold yearly, between Marion and Chilhowie, Virginia, and the business turns 50 this year.
As a boy, a bored Grant Hall threw the rocks that pocked the sign. Making Dip Dogs is the only business he’s ever known.
“In 1957, Lester Brown started it, and I don’t know where he got the Dip Dog recipe,” says Grant. “In 1966, my father was doing carpentry work at Lester’s house. We owned a cabin then at Hungry Mother Park. Somehow or another, a deal took place, and Lester owned the cabin while we owned the Dip Dog.
“My father stopped being a carpenter, and all five of the children worked here. I’m the one who stayed.”
Grant and his wife Pam mark another anniversary this year, their 30th as husband and wife, and the Dip Dog business is a partnership in the truest sense, despite a shaky first encounter.
When Pam was a schoolgirl, the Hall family rewarded area students who earned As and Bs on their report cards with free milkshakes, a practice that continues today.
“I came to get mine, and Grant waited on me,” Pam remembers. “He was shy at the time, and I went back out to the car and told my family he was the hatefulest old boy I’d ever seen in my life. Then when I was in the 8th grade, we officially met, and I realized who he was.”
Grant Hall says the restaurant is in the worst possible location. The opening of Interstate 81 in 1963 killed many businesses along Lee Highway, but the Dip Dog held on. The Halls believe the closeness of their family is one reason.
“We’re dedicated, and our family looks out for each other,” says Pam. “You don’t always find that today.”
Son Justin runs an automotive shop, and daughter Crystal, a teacher, is completing her doctorate in education, but both of them are well versed in Dip Dog procedure.
The Halls point out that a Dip Dog is not a corn dog. Classic red hot dogs are speared on wooden sticks, dipped into a special secret batter, deep-fried, and then either brushed or rolled in mustard.
“A lot of people think you can just put regular mustard on a Dip Dog, but you can’t,” says Pam. “Most mustards, like French’s, are too strong and overpowering for a Dip Dog. When you really get the flavor is when we put the dogs in a brown bag. To me that just gives them another taste. You open up that bag and get that mustard flavor going up your nose. It just takes your breath.”
At least a month is required for new employees to learn the craft of Dip-Dogging, after they graduate out of less demanding kitchen assignments.
“A lot of work goes into a Dip Dog,” says Grant. “Every day you come in and mix your batters. Your grease has got to be the right temperature, your batter’s got to be the right thickness, everything’s got to be right.
“I could probably give you the recipe and you still wouldn’t be successful at it. If everything ain’t right, it won’t cook. It’ll just blow up.”
The same batter swathes the restaurant’s onion rings, served in quantities of 10 or 12 in brown, grease-stained bags. In a typical week, 500 pounds of onions are peeled, battered and fried. Pam says the secret to making them sweet is to peel them and refrigerate them for a day.
“They won’t be half as strong, and you won’t cry half as much,” she coaches.
The Halls work elbow to elbow, blending their own barbecue sauce, assembling Philly cheese steak sandwiches, and crowning banana splits with vanilla custard.
“We might be business people, but we get in there and get our hands dirty with the kids,” says Pam. “Instead of ‘do this, do that,’ we get in there and work with them.”
That joyous labor goes on seven days a week. Adds Grant, “We wouldn’t know what a weekend off was. We close for a week in summer just to get a vacation.”
For the restaurant’s 50th anniversary, Grant and Pam made up some red and white “Got Dip Dogs” bumper stickers.
“A gentleman came in here one day,” says Pam, “and told us he asked his son, a soldier in Iraq, what he wanted his father to send him from home. The only thing the son mentioned was a bumper sticker from the Dip Dog Stand, to go on his Humvee, for a simple reminder of home.”
For the rock band Aerosmith, for limousines full of coiffed prom refugees and for the customers who’ve never left any of the Halls’ one million Bible tracts in the parking lot, the mustard-painted Dip Dog is an inexpensive indulgence, a simple rebellion against dieting, convention and conformity.
Hi-Way Drive-In
(The Dip Dog Stand)
LOCATION: 2051 Lee Highway (Interstate 81 Exit 39), Marion, Virginia
PHONE: 276-783-2698
HOURS: Open 9 a.m. to 10 p.m., seven days a week
--------GoTriCities--------
Food writer Fred Sauceman, author of the book “The Place Setting: Timeless Tastes of the Mountain South, from Bright Hope to Frog Hollow,” is senior writer and executive assistant to the president for public affairs at East Tennessee State University. E-mail him at sauceman@etsu.edu
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