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Built for speed
The man who makes the best hot dogs in town
BY MIKE MILIARD
Related links

The Dog Blog

Self-professed "hot-dog consultant" Paul DeGeorge’s running tally of the best wieners around. His verdict on Speed’s: "once you have a bite you cannot imagine having a better hot dog at any future point of your life. It is simple. Go! Go now!"

Chowhound

The online bible for Boston foodies. Fearing that Speed had retired, members were ecstatic when he made his first appearance of the year this April.

Holly Eats

Holly Moore’s ratings and ruminations on his favorite "roadside cafes, barbecue pits, diners, holes-in-walls, greasy spoons, [and] down home cooking restaurants." He gives Speed’s dogs five grease stains, and that ain’t bad.

They seek him like a guru, a sage. Venturing far afield into an urban outland, they trek through jungles of imposing warehouses and exhaust-belching semi trucks to find him. His presence in this distant, smoky redoubt is never guaranteed, so his followers keep each other informed of his comings and goings as best they can on Internet message boards.

"Where is Speed?"

"I spotted him. He was there."

And they come, to this out-of-the-way industrial park on the far end of Mass Ave. Truck drivers. Office workers. Laborers. Businessmen. Politicians. And they stand in line, sometimes for half an hour, to pay for a transcendent five-minute fix.

Speed serves hot dogs. But that’s a paltry description. A better one is emblazoned on the side of his van with P.T. Barnum bombast:

"BOSTON SPEED’S"

FAMOUS

HOT DOG WAGON

SINCE 1975

SERVING BOSTON’S MOST EXCITING HOT DOG

IN NEW MARKET SQUARE

BOSTON, MA

On this Wednesday afternoon, the crowd waiting patiently in line is a hungry cross-section of the city. Martha, Wendy, and Cindy are office workers from nearby.

"It’s my first time!" says Cindy. "I’m so excited."

"It’s the most exciting hot dog," says Wendy. "Really."

"It speaks to you!" says Martha. "It says, ‘Come and eat me!’"

Audrey McDonald is a suburban retiree who’s been coming for years. She hadn’t seen Speed lately, though, and was afraid he might be gone for good. (He comes out only on fair-weather Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, from 11:30 am or so, until the dogs are depleted or the line peters out.) She’s relieved, she says, and "salivating."

Twentysomething Paul, who hands me a self-made business card that identifies him as a "Hot Dog Consultant," takes photos of Speed to post online at his "dog blog" (www.roundonline.com/dogblog). He hasn’t been here in more than a year — he used to make the hour-and-a-half journey from Central Square for lunch — and the anticipation is killing him.

Inside the van, orange flames leap from the grill as the dogs — gargantuan dogs, eight inches long and a half-pound in weight — are wreathed in white steam. The air is heavy with the sharp summer odor of burning charcoal, commingling with spicy-sweet aromatics. Standing in the billowing, eye-stinging smoke is Speed himself.

His nickname is a misnomer. Speed is slow and deliberate, retrieving those big dogs from the propane grills where they’ve been marinating in mystery liquid in aluminum tubs, gaining flavor and maintaining moisture. He transfers them delicately to the glowing charcoal grill, where he brushes them with more marinade as he turns them gently on the hot briquettes. The buns — big buns, fresh and doughy — are toasted there, too.

When they’re done cooking, Larry, Speed’s new right-hand man, applies the condiments of your choosing. Get them all. There are diced onions. Kosher chili without beans. A tart blend of seven different kinds of mustard, whose precise proportions were established by Speed after hours of painstaking trial and error and will never be divulged. A sweet chutney, aged to pungent perfection. And Speed’s Special Sauce, whose ingredients are a mystery, and will remain so. There seems to be ketchup involved, but it doesn’t preponderate. Barbecue sauce too, perhaps. Was that a morsel of pineapple? There have even been apocryphal stories about the presence of grape jelly. Whatever it is, it works. Drizzled with Speed’s sauce and swaddled in wax paper, your dog is ready to eat.

You’ll need two hands. One gaping mouth. And many, many napkins. Once those prerequisites are secured, ready yourself for the first bite. Piping hot and steaming profusely, the dog explodes with flavor: sweet ... savory ... succulent ... smoky ... spicy. Sublime. Prepare to eat in silence. That’s partly because your mouth is full, but mostly it’s the sheer sensory overload: words escape.

Hot dog, new tricks

Ezra Anderson, a/k/a Speed, will be 85 on New Year’s Eve. His milky blue eyes, deep set in a craggy but smooth nut-brown face, evince a quiet, friendly intensity. He puts a plain, navy-blue cap over his cottony white hair, and wears white gloves and a light-blue lab coat embroidered with the words BOSTON SPEED. He speaks in a dulcet voice, soft but strong, with the tinge of a slightly melodious Mid-Atlantic accent.

It all began, he says, in the 1940s, apprenticing to the African-American cooks on the cross-country trains where he worked with the Pullman service. "To Seattle. To San Francisco. To Chicago. To St. Louis. All over." It was in those luxury cars, Speed says, that he came into contact with "the elite of the world. All of a sudden, one day, there they are. You can reach out and touch them."

One day, he met a president. "I jumped in the first car. A big white dude grabbed me: ‘Boy, where you going?’ I said, ‘I’m getting on the train!’ He says, ‘Well, get on up there, then!’ Well, I get in there, and who do you think is there? The president of the United States! Roosevelt. Exactly like that caricature: the cocky chin with the looong cigarette, like that. That’s the way he looked. I almost had a fit!"

Speed came to Boston from Richmond, Virginia, in 1955, when his wife took a teaching job at Wellesley. (They’ll celebrate their 50th anniversary this December.) He got a job running the concessions stand at the Elma Lewis Playhouse-in-the-Park, in Roxbury. By night, all night, he spun jazz records by the likes of Johnny "Hammond" Smith and Erroll Garner on WEZE and — in the time slot following talk-radio legend Jerry Williams — on WMEX. "At the first edition of the Newport Jazz Festival, I met quite a number of [jazz legends]," he says. "I’ll never forget the night when we were broadcasting and Harry James came down and asked, ‘Could I be on your program?’ It was so flattering to have a giant ask that."

In 1975, after giving up his radio show, Speed set up shop serving hot dogs in Newmarket Square, where he’s been ever since. A softball league played across the street, and he figured it would make for a decent-size customer base. At first, he cooked steaks, burgers, and chicken, too. But he soon decided to concentrate solely on his stock in trade. Little did he know that soon people would be arriving from afar, descending in droves, to taste his wares.

"I got people coming from all over to sample this hot dog," he says. "And I’ve had some very, very big people come out here to eat. I don’t know who they were, but I could see the kind of cars they’d drive."

These days, Speed is getting on in years. And the past several years have seen some tribulation. In 2003, the trailer he’d used for two decades, hauling it into Boston from his home in Framingham, caught fire and was destroyed. It looked like that would be the end of Speed’s dogs — until a check arrived. It was sent anonymously. And it was for more than $20,000. Someone really liked those hot dogs.

"I don’t know who it was," says Speed, who bought a bigger van and a generator. "I never asked, y’know? Because like the old folks say, you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth."

Even with the new equipment, he was thinking hard about retiring after last summer. But then there he was again this April.

"Sometimes you get in a mood, and then something happens to make you change your mind," he explains. "Now, I find myself coming out only weather permitting. I can’t take it like I used to, y’see." All the same, he says, he’s got to stay active. "Don’t hang it up. Because if you do, that’ll be the end of you."

Larry, a broad-smiling bear of a man who says Speed calls him an "adopted son," met Speed not long ago in a Bible study group at Greater Framingham Community Church.

"This gentleman came in and lent me a helping hand," says Speed of the man who could very well uphold his legacy. "I believe that he’s somebody who could take the wagon and do his thing. It’s pleasing to see that someone can handle the customers and keep the soul and the flavor of what you’ve established."

But for now, Speed is still firing up the grills.

Outside the van, a fat guy, condiments dripping from his dog, leans over to give Speed his thumbs-up. "Big guy. Best dogs in town."

They are the best dogs in town. And Speed knows it. But he has a confession.

"Believe it or not, I’ve never eaten one."

What!?

"Now, let me explain. I never have the occasion to eat one; the only thing I’ve ever eaten is a piece of one." Even that, he says, is strictly to ensure the fitness of his product. "To give me the consistency, the quality, the taste."

Still, how can someone cook hot dogs — huge and tasty hot dogs — for 30 years, yet never allow himself to eat one?

"You work around the food all day, you’re not in the mood for it. To sit down and have a whole hot dog made up, for me to eat it, from beginning to the end? No. Never." Speed pauses, with a wry grin. "But one of these days I’m gonna treat myself to one."

Mike Miliard can be reached at mmiliard[a]phx.com


Issue Date: June 24 - 30, 2005
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