So I'm visiting my in-laws in Michigan, and around here restaurants called Coney Islands are a thing, despite being a long way from New York City.
At first I thought it was a place that just sold Coney Island-style hot dogs (with "chili" and raw onions). While I like a good hot dog as much as any other red-blooded American man, I wouldn't think that it would be enough to run a whole chain of restaurants. From the ones I've been in, Coney Islands are diners that also have killer Greek gyros. Apparently it's very much a Michigan thing that's tied to Greek immigration.
Coney Island hot dog shops have a long, convoluted history. But Greek immigrants do feature prominently in the story.
From a poorly remembered oral history of a guy who started the Coney Island shop in Tulsa, I think that there was a national chain of them in the 1920s or thereabouts. I think that many/most/maybe nearly all of the individual store owners were Greek immigrants. Christ Economou (the guy who started the Tulsa store) was. And he had started other stores in the Midwest before he got to Oklahoma. The chain spelled the tubular-meat product "weiner," which is wrong, of course. They did it to avoid the potential of trademark infringement.
The chain--I think--then disappeared, but individual stores scattered from New York to Tulsa still remained. Some went out of business, others didn't.
But other Greek immigrants also had shops serving coneys and gyros. We had a long-lasting one of those--called Jim's Never on Sunday Coneys--in Tulsa, founded by a guy named Jim Boukadakis back in the 1950s. Or maybe it was his dad, and it was founded in the '20s or '30s. It closed a year or two ago. Jim's grandkids didn't want to keep it going.
The Coney Island store in Tulsa, the one started by Christ Economou and still run by the family, spun off its own expanded operation of drive-ins called Coney I-Landers. At some point, the family split up the business and the original (in downtown Tulsa) Coney Island store and the Coney I-Lander drive-ins are corporately independent of each other. But the menu is basically the same.
