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I'm asked all the time why I care so darn much about the "Birmingham hot dog."

"It's just a hot dog," people say. "What's the big deal about a hot dog?"

Which, I contend, is like asking Paris, "Who was that Eiffel fellow, and what's the big deal about that tower."

But it is hard to convince the skeptics.

I trot out the history, passed along by the likes of George Sarris and Niki Sepsas. I explain how Birmingham hot dogs, dispensed for decades in downtown holes in the wall by Greek immigrants with names like Pete and Gus and Sammy, nourished an upstart town as it burst, as if by magic, into a bustling industrial city.

I tell of the sandwich itself, a plain old wiener slathered with simmered ground beef and topped again with a special sauce of vinegar and catsup, chili powder, secret spices and a touch of allspice. Add onions if you want it. Add coleslaw, if you are wise. I tell how nobody else – not New York or Chicago or Weiner, Arkansas -- does dogs the way Birmingham does dogs.

But the skeptics still look at me like I'm driving the wrong way on a one-way street. Because the world has changed. They look around and see a city that is so different from the city I grew up in that it might as well sit on a different parallel. Culinarily and culturally.

Ronald Reagan was in the White House when I first started working downtown, and Richard Arrington ruled the third floor at City Hall with such authority it seemed he would hold it forever.

Back then you could get meat and vegetables all over town, at places like John's or Andy's on the Green (where Andy closed every sale with the standard greeting of "another fine customer.") Or you could get hot dogs. At Pete's Famous or Tony's Terrific, at Gus's or Jimmy's or Scott's Koneys or a dozen more.

And that was it. Sushi, 30 years ago, was just some foreign thing, and Mexican food was something that came, most of the time, in an Old El Paso can. If you'd asked for walnut pesto in a downtown restaurant back then they'd look at you like you were driving the wrong way. To Crazyland.

Chicken rillettes? Forget about it.

It's no wonder people these days don't find hot dogs so ... impressive. Not in a city with Frank Stitt and Chris Hastings, where bacon jam is almost as easy to find downtown as an old Southern meat and three. Why cling to a hot dog when you can walk from pad Thai to tikka masala to lemon saffron soup?

I get that. I do. But the Birmingham hot dog is a big deal anyway.

It made us who we are. It made restaurants and restaurateurs. It made memories, of fathers and sons together for a weekday lunch at Pete's Famous, and a peek into the humming world of adulthood.

Hot dogs are a constant in this city, an anchor to a past that is shared across generations, cultures, classes and races. Poor and powerful alike have for decades lined up in front of a smoky grill and debated nothing more inflammatory than the merits of special dogs over slaw dogs. Or vice versa.

Birmingham hot dogs can remind us where we've been, and just how far we have come. They remind us of those who turned nothing but a flat top and a recipe into empires. They can remind us of those who built this city, and they encourage us to do as much today.

In the end, those Birmingham hot dogs just taste really good.

That's a big deal, too.