Martha Stewart reveals her love of late-night hot dogs

If you find Martha Stewart at 11 p.m. in New York City, she may be eating a hot dog.

"After a long day with no dinner, sometimes I have to stop and get a hot dog," she told Bon Appétit before grilling skewers from her meal kit company, Martha & Marley Spoon, on the rooftop of Martha HQ. "I commute to Bedford [in Westchester, NY] every day, which is an hour away, so if I'm coming home from work at 11 o'clock at night, one of my drivers will bring us to Papaya King on the Upper East Side. That's an evil thing I do."

Two hot dogs with sauerkraut and mustard are her go-to order, while her driver opts for just ketchup. Stewart's been a hot dog fan since her childhood in New Jersey. Her family was "too poor to go out and rarely went to restaurants," she said, but they found time for hot fudge sundaes at ice cream parlors—if they saved up their babysitting money—and hot dogs.

Photographed by Hugh Stewart. Courtesy of Martha Stewart Living.

"Rutt's Hut [in Clifton, NJ] was a place we'd go. It was a hot dog place, and was probably a precursor to McDonald's. I stopped there recently and remembered my mother there. My mother loved hot dogs," she said with a smile. "They do all kinds of versions of hot dogs now, but they used to just use mustard, relish, ketchup, and sauerkraut. That was a nice place to eat together as a family."

Once they moved to Connecticut, everything changed. You see, the CT-style dog has a unique version of "the works": mustard, sauerkraut, bacon, and relish. Rawley's Drive-In in Fairfield is her all-time favorite, and that combination of flavors inspired her own hot dog at Pink's in Los Angeles. Her signature dog there has relish, onions, bacon, chopped tomatoes, sauerkraut, and a finishing drizzle of sour cream—no ketchup or mustard in sight.

So the next time you ask yourself, "What would Martha Stewart do?" the answer is simple—eat a hot dog.

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