The Slaw Dog at Frank Allen’s Market & Grill costs about $2.50 and comes off a flat-top grill wedged in the back of a Marathon gas station. Dolly Parton says it is her favorite hot dog on the planet.
She said so herself, to Southern Living back in 2010, and she did not hedge. “Everyone is always looking for a ‘joint’ to eat at that only locals know. Frank Allen’s is a local Sevier County experience I love,” she said. “My favorite is their Slaw Dog, but you’ll have to eat your way through the menu and find your own very favorite treat. Just be sure to tell them Dolly sent you.” The spot sits on the Parkway in Sevierville, the East Tennessee town where she grew up.
Think about that for a second. This is a woman who could hire the best chefs alive and eat in the finest restaurants in the world. She keeps circling back to a hot dog that costs less than a gallon of the gas sold out front.
Her Favorite Hot Dog Hides Behind The Gas Pumps
Frank Allen’s sits at 930 Parkway in Sevierville, right before you cross into the Pigeon Forge city limits. It is part diner, part convenience store, part gas station, and it is dead easy to blow right past on your way to Dollywood or the outlet malls. There is no giant billboard bragging about the Dolly connection either, which is strange when you sit with it. If she had said this about almost any other place on that strip, there would be signs up and down the road cashing in on it.
Inside, the only nod to her is a pair of small 8×10 photos hung on the wall above the griddle. They are headshots, not candid pictures of her eating a dog at the counter. So whether the queen of country still slips in for lunch is anybody’s guess. Travelers keep calling it a hidden gem anyway, and the room itself is small: a few booths, a row of stools, and a flat-top packed with burgers, dogs, eggs, and hashbrowns during the morning rush.
What Exactly Is A Slaw Dog
A slaw dog is a hot dog topped with coleslaw, plus mustard and onions most of the time. Simple as that. At Frank Allen’s, the standard build is really a chili dog with the slaw, mustard, and onions piled on top. Order one “all the way” and the chili is coming whether you planned for it or not.
Coleslaw on a hot dog throws some people, mostly folks from up North who raise an eyebrow at the whole idea. Treat it like a Southern cousin of sauerkraut. Cabbage and hot dogs have always gotten along fine. The cold, creamy crunch against a hot, salty dog is the entire point, and it is a point of real regional pride across the South. Parton is not eating anything exotic here. She is eating the thing she grew up around, dressed exactly the way Sevier County likes it.
The Man Behind The Grill
Frank Allen started in the grocery business at 13, making deliveries on his bicycle before going to work in his father’s store. In 1953, Frank and his wife Ernestine opened their own market. Eight years later they added a grill and started selling the hot dogs and hamburgers that would eventually make the name famous.
The market moved a couple of times over the decades and eventually passed down to Frank and Ernestine’s daughter. Frank died in 2010 at the age of 90. The business is no longer owned by the Allen family, but the name and the food both stuck around. The menu today would still look familiar to someone who wandered in back in 1961, and that likely includes a young Dolly Parton. That is a big part of the appeal. The place has been feeding people in her corner of Tennessee since before she was a star.
The Cheeseburger Might Be The Real Star
The Slaw Dog gets the celebrity shoutout, but the cheeseburger is what actually built the reputation. Frank Allen’s took home the award for best cheeseburger in Sevier County for close to 20 years in a row. It goes for around $4.49. Want more meat, the double bacon cheeseburger runs $6.89, and there are steak burgers on the board too.
The specialty dogs come two for $5, and the kitchen gets creative with them. The Inferno Dog, the Nacho Dog, and the Barbecue Dog all sit right next to the Slaw Dog, and there are corndogs, plain hot dogs, and bacon cheese dogs as well. Sides cover onion rings, crinkle-cut fries, and coleslaw. The most expensive thing on the menu is the Super Granddaddy, a two-foot sub packed with five meats and two cheeses that runs $7.99. Even the priciest item here costs less than a couple of coffees at some places.
The Slaw Dog Has Depression-Era Roots
The slaw dog is bigger than one gas station. It first popped up in West Virginia in the early 1920s and caught on hard during the Great Depression, back when hot dogs and cabbage were about all a struggling family could scrape together for dinner. As Christopher Scott Jones, a contributor to the West Virginia Hot Dog Blog, put it, “Basically, nobody had any money, and in thinking of what to eat, it had to be something cheap and memorable.”
From there it spread across the South, and by now just about every state and town has its own version of the thing they will argue about for hours. In Georgia you can grab one at the Varsity in Atlanta. In Tennessee, Parton grabs hers at Frank Allen’s. She grew up eating whatever was around in the mountains, so a cheap dog dressed in cabbage lines up perfectly with the story she has told for years.
Why She Keeps Coming Back
Money changed almost everything about Parton’s life. It did not change what she wants to eat. The hot dog is not fancy, it is not slow-smoked over hickory by a chef with a decade of training, and it does not pretend to be. It is a hot dog, and that is the whole draw.
The pull seems to be the connection to who she was before the wigs and the rhinestones. A gas station grill in Sevier County ties her straight back to the girl who grew up poor in these mountains, eating whatever the family could put together. A famous person could send someone to pick one up incognito, and honestly nobody would recognize her without the makeup and the hair. Her voice would give her away long before her face did. Either way, the draw of a good slaw dog has never been about looking rich. It is about tasting like home.
Parton Eats Like The Rest Of Us
The gas station dog is not a one-off quirk. Parton’s whole taste in food runs about as down-home as it gets for someone worth what she is worth. Ask her favorite food and she will say potatoes, any kind at all. “I’ve always been a potato person, even if it’s a mashed potato, or a french fry, or if I just baked a potato,” she told Allrecipes. Her favorite condiment is butter, and she wants lots of it.
She is a regular at Taco Bell too, telling Business Insider in 2022, “I always get a Taco Supreme, with the sour cream and all that, in the soft shell. I love that.” For dinner parties she serves roast pork with green beans, turnip greens, and fried okra. “I love roast pork, especially the fatty part,” she told The New York Times back in 1992. “I can’t help it, the greasier the food, the better.” Growing up in the mountains, she also ate bear, rabbit, squirrel, and groundhog, plus frogs and catfish from the local streams.
Even her fancier picks come with a country twist. Her favorite appetizer is clams casino, except she has the kitchen chop the clams up because she does not like them big and chewy. Behind all the sparkle is somebody who would rather have a $2.50 hot dog than a white tablecloth, and she has never hidden it. As she once told Elle, a rhinestone shines just as good as a diamond. Turns out a gas station slaw dog does too.
