Gray's: The Cheapest Best Dog in New York

My darling husband, in a comment about a former post, said that Sabrett hot dogs suck. I know what he means, but I’d like to note that Sabrett (parent company: Marathon) franks themselves do not suck; they are of high quality, and they dominate the frankdom of NYC (read more about it here in Ed Levine’s 2005 New York Times article). It’s just that a lot of these little street carts in Manhattan that serve Sabrett franks do an awful job of preparing them—it’s a injustice to Sabrett, really.

To prove my point, Sabrett/Marathon in all likelihood supplies the franks to my favorite NYC hot dog joint, Gray’s Papaya. If Papaya King is about presentation, Gray’s is about thrift. Those dogs are infamously cheap and infamously edible. It’s the best lunch deal in New York: two hot dogs and a papaya drink for $2.99. I think a single dog is a whopping 75 cents. Where in Manhattan, let alone anywhere in the USA, can you get a hot dog deal like that? (Maybe in West Virginia, maybe, but those dogs are another thing altogether.)

Gray’s offers pretty much the same concept of Papaya King, but the menu is not as extensive (Papaya King sells fries, but who needs fries when you could have a second hot dog instead?) and the premises tends not to be as tidy. That’s what you get for a 75-cent hot dog.

There’s a great Gray’s/Papaya King debate that has been raging for years. My allegiance is with Gray’s, even if they are a Papaya King knockoff started in the 1970s by a former Papaya King employee. That’s because of nostalgia. I used to work at a magazine test kitchen in Manhattan, and every morning I’d go down to Balducci’s (the original location; this was the late 1990s) to buy groceries for the recipes I’d be testing that day. Sometimes if I screwed up—which, sadly, was not infrequent—I’d have to go back downtown and get more supplies so I could re-test the recipe. It might be around or after noon, and I might be hungry. In a great anthology called Roadside Food I’d read about papaya dogs, and one day while looking for a subway entrance close to Balducci’s I ran across a Gray’s Papaya, and I had to try one of the Recession Specials they’d mentioned in the book (the Recession Special is the aforementioned 2-dog, 1-drink, $2.99 steal).

I was hooked. I loved the cheapness, the speed, the frank-papaya combo. It became a special treat to go to Gray’s and have what I call 30-second hot dogs. Most food I believe is best eaten like a civilized human: sitting down, savoring the bites, talking with friends or family or alone, reading a great book or magazine. Cloth napkins are a plus.

Well, with hot dogs, I’m not that way at all. I like to gobble them down while standing or walking, and I usually do it in under one minute per frank. It’s a great way for an urbanite to connect with their inner savage.

So, because of the soothing hot dog respites I took in the West Village (at 6th Ave & 8th St), my heart belongs to Gray’s. Gray’s dogs are sloppily assembled, and their buns can be unevenly toasted. Each hot dogs comes on a flimsy, tiny paper plate that you can cradle around the bun like a taco shell. The papaya drinks are frothier and seemingly less pure than Papaya King—they have almost an Orange Julius thing going on.

This Gray’s in the West Village is what I think of as the Papaya Dog Triangle. There’s a Papaya King (7th Ave & 14th St) nearby, and two knockoff-knockoff papaya dog joints as well, Chelsea Dog and Papaya Dog. I have not yet worked up the courage to visit these imitators, but my feelings are that two papaya dog sellers are enough. Here in Astoria on Steinway, there’s a place called Mano’s Papaya. My husband and I ate there once, and we were disheartened with their dogs and drinks—not enough oomph. My rule of thumb is the more non-frank/non-tropical items on the menu, the less focused and less spellbinding the papaya dogs will be.

Sadly, my last Gray’s Papaya visit was a letdown. We were in the Garment District shopping for fabric and saw one somewhere around 34th St. I had the recession special and my heart did not skip a beat. Perhaps now that I live in New York the availability of my hitherto twice-a-year papaya dog splurges has tarnished some of their sheen. Either that, or it’s not as good as the West Village Gray’s.