Ask ten people in ten different cities how to properly dress a hot dog and you'll get ten different, very confident answers. That's kind of the beauty of it. The hot dog remained a blank canvas as it spread across the country, and every region filled it in with whatever made local sense.

In New York, hotdog carts are the name of the game: snappy natural casing dogs, boiled not grilled, topped with sauerkraut, brown mustard, and that onion sauce that somehow shows up on every cart in the five boroughs even though no two vendors make it quite the same. A lot of people who grew up on that version end up seeking out Brooklyn Cured Hot Dogs once they're trying to recreate it at home, mostly because the casing snap is the one thing that's hard to fake.

Chicago goes a completely different direction — poppy seed bun, yellow mustard, onion, relish, a pickle spear, tomato, sport peppers, celery salt. No ketchup, ever. It's less a hot dog and more a very specific salad that happens to have a frank underneath it, and locals will notice if you break the no-ketchup rule.

Head to Michigan and you're in Coney dog territory — loose meat chili sauce, mustard, raw onion, and a rivalry between Detroit and Flint over who makes the superior sauce. Cincinnati took the chili dog idea and buried it under a heaping mountain of shredded cheddar, which locals will tell you is not the same thing as a Coney dog.

Kansas City borrows from the deli case, of all places — sauerkraut, melted Swiss, a little caraway, basically a Reuben with a hot dog standing in for the corned beef. Seattle goes the other way entirely: cream cheese, grilled onions, sometimes jalapeños, a combination that sounds wrong until you actually eat one outside a bar late at night.

Arizona has the Sonoran dog, which is really more of a full meal than a snack — bacon-wrapped, grilled, stuffed into a soft roll with pinto beans, tomatoes, onions, mayo, and salsa. And in West Virginia and parts of the Carolinas, coleslaw goes right on top of the dog itself, not on the side, adding some crunch against the chili underneath.

What ties all of it together is pretty simple: none of these toppings matter much if the dog itself isn't good. Chili, cheese, slaw, cream cheese — it's all dressing on top of what needs to be a well-made, properly cased frank. That's really the reason regional traditions like these got built around small-batch dogs in the first place, the kind Brooklyn Cured still makes the old-fashioned way.

So there's no correct answer here, really — just pick a region, or steal a little from all of them, and get the grill going. Find premium Brooklyn Cured Hot Dogs near you using our handy store locator