My Coney Island Experience

While I was in Wisconsin, my dad and I made a side trip up to Sheboygan to the Kohler Art Center to check out the "Sublime Spaces and Visionary Worlds" exhibit. This is basically a show about crazy people that transform their houses/farms/environment into their version of reality. I really like this sort of thing and whenever I travel, I try to seek out these peculiar people of vision. A few years ago, I lived next door to a couple (they are in their sixties, at least) who transformed their home into a cross between "The Wizard of Oz" and an undersea realm. They are the nicest people......just a little out there.

Anyway, the show was good, but as it usually happens on road trips...we got hungry. That is another thing I like to do when I travel--eat. Most of the time I have some plan or research to go on, but this time I was winging it. So we just sort of cruised downtown Sheboygan seeing what there was. I'm pretty much a sucker for old-timey neon signs, so when I spotted this one I had Dad pull over and we checked it out. My rationale here is--if the sign is so old, they must have been around for a while, so how bad could the food be? If it was crap, they would have gone out of business long ago, huh?



It was a typical small-town diner--burgers, fries, sandwiches, pork chop dinners. You know.
Dale had been going on about Coney Island hot dogs after his trip to Michigan this spring. Detroit is the birthplace of the Coney Island, but I guess they are popular throughout the Midwest. So when I saw it on the menu, I thought, why not?



The dog was tasty. The mellowness of the chili was offset by the tanginess of the mustard and the sharpness of the onions. The fries were nice and hot. It came with a cole slaw that was unlike any slaw I have had. More like chopped, pickled cabbage. Sort of like the one you get in Chinese restaurants, except instead of ginger it had caraway or fennel. It was really good, I could have had another portion for sure. Dad had a BLT and a really nice cup of beef barley soup. Really meaty flavor and nice and thick.