Tony Packo's: A Hungarian Hot Dog and a Television Legend
Near Toledo, Ohio
On the east side of the Maumee River, in the Birmingham neighborhood that Hungarian immigrants built into a working-class enclave over several generations, sits a restaurant that became famous in one of the most roundabout ways imaginable.
Tony Packo was born in nineteen oh-eight, the son of Hungarian immigrants who had settled in East Toledo to work in the iron and steel foundries that lined the river. In nineteen thirty-two, in the depths of the Great Depression, Tony and his wife Rose borrowed one hundred dollars from relatives and opened a sandwich and ice cream shop. In nineteen thirty-five, Tony trademarked his signature creation: the Hungarian Hot Dog, which is not a hot dog at all in the conventional sense but a kolbász sausage, sliced lengthwise, served on rye bread under a spiced chili sauce with mustard and onions. It became the taste of the neighborhood.
The restaurant might have stayed a neighborhood institution forever. Then Jamie Farr happened. Farr was a Toledo native, born in the same East Side Hungarian community, who went on to play Corporal Maxwell Klinger on the television series MASH. Klinger was obsessed with getting out of the Korean War by pretending to be insane. He was also obsessed with getting back to Toledo. In a nineteen seventy-six episode, Klinger praised Tony Packo's for having the greatest Hungarian hot dogs.
MASH ran until nineteen eighty-three and was watched by a huge audience. Letters poured in from around the world. People who had never been to Ohio began writing to ask if Tony Packo's was real. It was. It still is.
