My favorite Lafayette Coney Island moment came in 2002 when the Carolina Hurricanes were playing the Red Wings in the Stanley Cup finals during Detroit’s “Hockeytown” era.
The Canes were owned then by Peter Karmanos, a Detroit entrepreneur who built the Compuware company and the downtown skyscraper now known as One Campus Martius.
Carolina upset the Wings in Game 1 at Joe Louis Arena, putting Karmanos in a good mood. Before Game 2, he brought a group of family members and friends to the downtown restaurant on Lafayette so they could enjoy this authentic Motor City dining experience.
After we ordered, I glanced at the wall above Pete’s head. There on display hung a framed photo of grinning Lafayette Coney Island waiters holding the Stanley Cup in celebration of a Wings’ championship a few years before.
“I didn’t even see that,” Karmanos said with a smile over the bad omen, certainly some kind of a jinx. Sure enough, his team lost that night and lost the series to Detroit in five games. Four years later, Carolina won the Cup in seven games over Edmonton.
I stopped by Lafayette late last week, just to see if it had re-opened after shutting down in late January due to a rat report. But it remained closed. Although a sign on the door said that was due to remodeling, there didn’t appear to be anyone working inside the darkened space.
So I went next door for lunch to its larger, brighter ultra-rival, American Coney Island, where I saw no rats (and few customers).
I ordered my usual — “One of each on one, light onion” — which, to the layman, means: “Please bring me on a single plate one loose hamburger and one hot dog, both with mustard and chili gravy, but easy on the chopped onion.”
The service was fast, the food was fine, and the price was right: $10.34 plus two bucks for a tip. And it all brought back some memories. I first dined at the Coneys — both American and Lafayette — around the year 1960.
My dad would take his kids there after Tigers baseball games at Briggs (Tiger) Stadium or maybe after the Labor Day parade. Years later, I’d eat alone on my lunch hour from work or, sometimes, with friends after sports or concerts or movies.
Once in a while, you’d see in both American and Lafayette people dressed in tuxedos and evening gowns after weddings or proms, often talking loudly and laughing in the hour after the bars closed. Occasionally, you might see the Stanley Cup.
Even before then, waiters in aprons on the sidewalk outside the two restaurants — owned by the two Keros brothers, Gust and Bill — would stand there waving in customers with white towels, pretending (we thought) to argue with each other in a language we didn’t understand.
We called the sandwiches “gut grenades” and you can guess why. Originally, the term “Coney Island” applied to just the hot dogs and loose hamburgers (which some might identify as cousins of chili dogs and sloppy joes).
But as the decades passed, the term “Coney” got applied to all the restaurants that sold these burgers and dogs in that style around metro Detroit. That included those that expanded their menus far from the basic fare that dominated the two downtown rivals.
So people here now say “Let’s meet at that Coney by you” the way people on the East Coast might say “Let’s meet at that diner near you.”
American was founded first, by Gust in 1917. According to the Detroit Historical Society, Greek immigrants might have started calling hot dogs “Coney Islands” because they passed through the oceanside park — Coney Island is in Brooklyn, New York. That may have been Gust’s first encounter with the American hot dog after immigrating from Greece.
After decades of family rivalry, Lafayette was sold to its employees in the early 1990s. American remains owned and run by Grace Keros, a granddaughter of the founder. Last month, she called a news conference to stress that her place next door to Lafayette has no rodents and remains open.
“I’m pissed,” Keros told the news media, referring to the rats next door. “I’m annoyed. I’m upset.”
She said — because the two Coneys share one common wall — the news media and the public will assume her place also has rodents. She mentioned that Lafayette got shut down for rat reasons in 2022.
“I’ll be damned if I’m going to allow them to hinder my business,” Keros said, adding, “This is my reputation. This is my livelihood … I’ve had it.” She described the relationship with Lafayette as “love-hate” but added, “Now, it’s gotten dangerous” due to the rats. “I’ve had enough,” she said. “I’m sick of it.”
A recent Free Press article quoted the book Coney Detroit, whose co-author, Joe Grimm, called Detroit the heart of Coney Nation. “Nowhere else in the world will you find as many Coney Island restaurants, as many ways to eat Coneys or as many people who love them,” Grimm said.
So it’s good to know that the Motor City has contributed such exotic food — plus square pizza and Vernors’ ginger ale — to the American cuisine. Just be aware, Michiganders, when seeking our food specialty elsewhere, that not everyone speaks our language.
It’s like ordering “pop” on the east or west coasts. It just isn’t done. For example…
When we lived in the New York area some years ago, a young relative came for a summer visit. Wanting to give him an authentic New York experience, I took him on the subway to Coney Island to see the Atlantic Ocean, the amusement park, and a first-rate boardwalk.
This worked up our appetites, so we walked over to Nathan’s, the legendary hot dog stand that hosts the annual hot-dog eating contest on the Fourth of July.
My companion told the server at the counter “Two Coneys, please” and the Nathan’s Coney Island hot dog worker looked back at him with a blank expression and said, “Huh?”
