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Due to zoning regulations, the trademark Pal’s hotdog was made out of brick for the new location in Johnson City, Tennessee. The hot dog and a companion hamburger weighed in at about 6,500 pounds.
The anatomy of a (really big) hot dog Planning regulations in Johnson City, Tennessee produced a 26-foot bun and frankfurter made of brick, and it’s the talk of the town.
since the food art is typically made of fiberglass. In assessing the situation, Pal’s soon realized that stone was never really an option. So Pal’s, a 29-loca- tion chain based in Kingsport, opted for brick. “When we saw that we weren’t going to get them to give, we said, ‘We’ve got lemons and how do we make lemonade,’” says Pal’s president and CEO, Thom Crosby. Pal’s mounted a national search, and found few- er than a dozen companies with the resources to do the job. The list was narrowed down to three, and then to one, Images in Brick in Lincoln, Ne- braska. Tschetter took about four months and used about 2,000 bricks to complete the hot dog.
By RICHARD MASSEY Managing Editor
J ohnson City is a quaint place of 66,000 people near the Blue Ridge Mountains in northeast Tennessee. Perhaps best known as the childhood home of football coach Steve Spurrier, and for its ties to popular soft drink Mountain Dew, Johnson City has recently added a new claim to fame – a 26- foot hot dog made of brick. A key piece of the branding “trade dress” of beloved regional fast food chain Pal’s Sudden Service, the hot dog, and a companion hamburger, had to com- ply with the city’s Design Overlay District, which says that 75 percent of the exterior building must be brick or naturally quarried stone. “When we saw that we weren’t going to get them to give, we said, ‘We’ve got lemons and how do we make lemonade.’”
Thom Crosby, President and CEO, Pal’s Sudden Service
Jay Schetter, Founder and
And that’s when things got interesting.
President, Images in Brick
“This was a very unusual project – quite out of the ordinary,” says Jay Tschetter, founder and presi- dent of Images in Brick.
That put a big wrinkle in the restaurant’s plans,
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