PATRICK FORT

It’s a rainy weeknight, but the original Ben's Chili Bowl in Washington, D.C. is packed.

There’s a line to order, and everyone’s carrying their raincoats and umbrellas, and it’s
making it really hard to move around while you’re trying to get a seat.

RUTH TAM
We’re on a mission to eat a half-smoke -- perhaps the most D.C. food around. And we’re
with our friend Elly. She’s relatively new to the District, and the only time she’d been to
Ben's Chili Bowl was at the airport which, in my opinion, does not count.

PATRICK FORT
It’s not just your opinion. It definitely does not count.

RUTH TAM
Doesn’t count, Elly!

ELLY YU
Two original half-smokes?

PATRICK FORT
Yep.

ELLY YU
Two original half-smokes?

BEN’S CHILI BOWL EMPLOYEE

So two original half-smokes with everything? Chili, mustard, onion on it?

ELLY YU
Yes.

PATRICK FORT
Elly and I definitely know what we’re doing. We order half-smokes, but...not Ruth.

RUTH TAM
Oh, hi. Can I get the jumbo dog with fries please?

RUTH TAM
Okay, so what I wanted was a half-smoke without chili. I guess this is the moment I realized
I didn’t even know what a half-smoke was.

PATRICK FORT
So we asked around.

Person 1
I don’t know. I think it’s some type of barbecue maybe? Right? I don’t know.

Person 2
I'll say the half-smoke is more like a sausage.
Person 3
Half-smoke, I think, is like, one half of the hot dog is cooked and the other just, like, left raw.

RUTH TAM
[laughter] A medium rare sausage, anyone? No!

PATRICK FORT
It’s still funny.

Theme song

PATRICK FORT
This is Dish City from WAMU. I'm Patrick Fort.

RUTH TAM
And I'm Ruth Tam. We’re on a mission to eat all of D.C.'s iconic foods. We want to know
who makes them, who eats them and what they mean in a city that’s rapidly changing.

We’re both relatively new Washingtonians. I've been here for six years.

PATRICK FORT
I’ve lived here off and on for almost five. It’s always been clear to us that we’d start this
series with the half-smoke…it’s the closest D.C. comes to having an “official food.”

Obviously they’re delicious but we also wanted to figure out why the half-smoke, and Ben's
Chili Bowl, are so important to D.C.

RUTH TAM
And we wanted to know how the half-smoke can ​survive​ in a city that barely resembles the
one the food was born into.

------

PATRICK FORT
So, Ruth, do you remember when you first time you heard about half-smokes?

RUTH TAM
Not at all, it’s like it was always there.

PATRICK FORT
Yeah I feel exactly the same way. I don’t remember the first time I had one, it just seems
like half-smokes were, like, omnipresent.

RUTH TAM
Yeah. I mean, they’re a D.C. institution. And maybe the reason we, as transplants, know
about half-smokes is because Ben's Chili Bowl has had so many famous guests.

PATRICK FORT
Yeah, I mean, like Anthony Bourdain went there.
ANTHONY BOURDAIN (TV Clip)
Outside of D.C., I mean, I've never heard it before. What is it?

RUTH TAM
President Obama’s visisted. Along with like, a million other politicians.

BARACK OBAMA
Hey, how come he’s got some sweet shredded cheese on his, and I don’t have one on
mine?

RUTH TAM
Just because I knew half-smokes were important to D.C., didn’t mean I knew why.

PATRICK FORT
And, I mean, who would you even ask that question to? You wouldn’t just walk up to a New
Yorker and demand to know why a dollar slice of pizza is important to them. It just is!

RUTH TAM
But to be fair, you don’t have to know what’s in a half-smoke to enjoy eating one. And that’s
why we started our half-smoke journey with Elly, a new Washingtonian.

ELLY YU
Tastes like a mix between a hot dog and a sausage. It’s spicy. I like the spicy. The snap, I
like the snap of the casing.

PATRICK FORT
Another successful convert. But we weren’t any closer to defining the half-smoke.

So we drove up to Baltimore -- straight to the source.

PATRICK FORT
Here’s we are in the parking lot of Manger’s Slaughterhouse. Open today, the sign says.
Let’s uh, learn how the sausage gets made. Is the door this way?

RUTH TAM
The half-smokes you eat at Ben's all come from one place: Mangers Packing Corporation.
ALVIN MANGER
My name is Alvin Manger. I'm the fourth generation of this family business.

PATRICK FORT
But before we can ask what distinguishes Ben's half-smokes from all the other sausages
that come from Manger's, Alvin helps us suit up.

ALVIN MANGER
I'm gonna get you all a couple coats and hats and let you see in there before we start.

PATRICK FORT
That was exactly our plan.
Thank you. How do you feel?
RUTH TAM
So professional. Very suited up right now.

PATRICK FORT
If you weren’t in the main production area, you wouldn’t really know that you were in a meat
processing plant? Feels kinda like a really old office building. Or, your grandpa’s house.

RUTH TAM
We walk into the sausage stuffing room and there’s this huge metal tub of the most ground
meat that I’ve ever seen in my life. The tub is so big that if it were empty, I’d be able to fit
into it. And those, like, tendrils of ground beef that you see at the grocery store or a
butchers. And it’s kind of this orange, terra cotta color because it’s got all these spices in it.
And there’s a label on top of it that says “Hot Smoked Sausage” so you know exactly what
meat blend it is.

ALVIN MANGER
Today we’re finishing up the week...So today...it was a little bit light. We made probably
about 2000 pounds.

PATRICK FORT
And that’s pretty typical?

ALVIN MANGER
Yes.

PATRICK FORT
But enough with the sausage math. We wanna know what makes a half-smoke a
half-smoke.

ALVIN MANGER
No one knows exactly why it’s called a half-smoke. But the fact that the two words are
together, half and smoke...

PATRICK FORT
Alvin has his theories though. Because it’s not smoked as long as, say, a ham...

ALVIN MANGER
It is a less smoked product, producing a different flavor.

PATRICK FORT
We press on. What goes into the half-smoke? And what makes the ones at Ben's Chili Bowl
special?

ALVIN MANGER
We have a pork and beef mixture in a natural casing. With our specified spices. That’s the
only thing I can tell you about it.

RUTH TAM
Okay, fine. The exact ingredients might be a secret, but here are the three things you need
in a half-smoke: the snap of the natural casing, the smokiness in the ground meat, and the
spice that brings it all together.

PATRICK FORT
Snap. Smoke. Spice.

RUTH TAM
Boom.

PATRICK FORT
Manger's didn’t invent the half smoke. That honor goes to Briggs & Company Meat
Packers.

RUTH TAM
Then this place in Arlington called Weenie Beenie made it a thing in the 50’s.

People say that Weenie Beenie did it first, but...Ben's made it famous.

Music

PATRICK FORT
Virginia Ali and her husband Ben opened Ben's Chili Bowl in 1958.

VIRGINIA ALI
I remember simple things. Women didn’t wear pants. Jeans were worn by farmers. Tennis
shoes were worn on the tennis courts. And I remember, if we walked from the Chili Bowl to
the Howard Theatre for a performance and we heard profanity, we could almost have him
arrested.

RUTH TAM
U Street back in the 50’s was just as much of a hub as it is now. There were clubs, music
venues, bars...

PATRICK FORT
The neighborhood was a hangout for the greatest black writers, musicians and thinkers of
that time.

VIRGINIA ALI
This was the African American community. And this is where all the action was. This was
Black Broadway. This is where people were. On a Friday, Saturday night, when you were
out at the clubs, we were open until four o’clock in the morning. We had a slogan, sober up
at the chili dog [laughs].

RUTH TAM
Looking back, it seems like this time really cemented the half-smoke as U Street's comfort
food, and Ben's was its home
VIRGINIA ALI
We had the jukebox with the music going all the time. We tried to hire a very friendly staff.
And we tried to provide an atmosphere of home.

RUTH TAM
But in 1968, after ten years in business, their world changed. That’s next.

------

RUTH TAM
When Virginia Ali, the co-founder of Ben's Chili Bowl, heard that Martin Luther King, Junior
had been assassinated, she did not believe it.

VIRGINIA ALI
How could this very gentle leader of ours be taken away so violently? So people were
crying, everybody’s crying. And all this sadness, and after a while, the sadness turned into
frustration and the frustration turned to anger and the uprising began.

NEWSCASTER
From the air, the scene looked unreal. A row of fires in the middle of an otherwise tranquil
city.

PATRICK FORT
People in cities across the nation took to the streets. Shocked and angry over the death of a
national hero.

NEWSCASTER #2
Late today, the president declared a state of emergency and regular Army troops moved
into the nation’s capital to protect strategic locations from the violence spreading through
the city.

RUTH TAM
The city burned. Windows were shattered. Hundreds of businesses and homes were
destroyed. And Ben's Chili Bowl was right in the middle of it all.

VIRGINIA ALI
You don’t know if you’re gonna find a Molotov cocktail coming in the window when you get
here the next morning, your place is gone too.

PATRICK FORT
The civil rights leader Stokely Carmichael called for businesses to close.

RUTH TAM
But he insisted that one restaurant stay open. Ben’s Chili Bowl.

PATRICK FORT
It’s like people knew there was comfort in a half-smoke. Refuge in sitting in a booth at Ben’s
and escaping the chaos outside. Ben’s couldn’t close. But even that didn’t guarantee its
survival.
VIRGINIA ALI
We were out here for a long time alone. During that bad time, we were alone. Middle class
African Americans were moving away rapidly. And we just were left with this boarded up,
burned down, devastated community. Heroin moved in, then crack moved in. And this
beautiful community became a serious ghetto.

PATRICK FORT
The next 20 years were tough on Ben's Chili Bowl and on U Street. That is, until 1988.

VIRGINIA ALI
1988, the city decided to built the subway system here. They found three surviving
businesses in the immediate vicinity. Our bank, our flower shop --Lee’s Flower Shop, now
being operated by the third generation. And Ben’s. Not enough to maintain one lane of
traffic out there. The contractors simply dug up that entire wide street.

RUTH TAM
The new Metro station signalled that big changes were ahead. Suddenly, U Street was
attracting developers and new business owners. And over the next twenty years, the blocks
surrounding Ben's Chili Bowl changed slowly, then rapidly, until the neighborhood was
nearly unrecognizable.

PATRICK FORT
Realtors even began using U Street's history as a marketing tool.

REAL ESTATE AGENT

It’s a rich history on U Street. But you also have a lot of new developers coming in, new
people coming in. They like that rich history. They like the jazz clubs. And then you have
some of these new developers that are building these cool loft-style condominiums that
some of these new young people love. They like to have that exposed brick. That exposed
ductwork. We’re seeing a lot of people coming over here to get there, and still have a rich
history in their neighborhood.

PATRICK FORT
In 2019, it’s cool to live near historic businesses like Ben's, in a posh building named after
Duke Ellington, who lived and performed nearby. But U Street, and its adjacent
neighborhood, Shaw, has had its fair share of growing pains. And one of the most visible
happened this spring.

For years, a Metro PCS cell phone store in Shaw played go-go music out of a huge PA
system. It could be heard from blocks away. And it’s long been D.C.'s unofficial soundtrack.

NEWSCASTER #3
Just last month, the owner of this popular mobile phone store in the historically black Shaw
neighborhood was ordered to turn down the go-go. The owner claims the complaint came
from a resident from a new apartment building nearby.

RUTH TAM
A bunch of protesters shut down traffic outside the store, which is maybe the best way to
get people’s attention inside the Beltway. And at the end of it all, go-go was allowed to
continue playing at the store. At least for now.
The Metro PCS debacle made a lot of people think about what part of D.C. culture gets
embraced --whether it’s go-go or half-smokes-- and what gets discarded. and who decides?

PATRICK FORT
I feel implicated in all this? Like we said, I'm new here. I live in a glossy apartment building
that replaced a bunch of old walk-ups. I don’t want my choices to force D.C. to change and
yet, it’s happening anyway.

I've been carrying this displacement baggage basically since I moved here. And I definitely
felt the weight of it the first time I noticed this restaurant called Halfsmoke a few years ago.
From the outside, it looks like part of the new wave of development near U Street. It’s got
this hip sans serif font and those trendy edison light bulbs.

RUTH TAM
Right...You get really used to eyeing new restaurants like this and wondering if they were
made for all Washingtonians or...for the type of people that complain about go-go.

PATRICK FORT
And on top of that, it seems kind of bold that this new half-smoke place would open literally
just a few blocks from Ben's, the original D.C. half-smoke restaurant.

Who would do that?

Music

ANDRE MCCAIN
Yeah, I grew up in Deanwood, Northeast.

RUTH TAM
Meet Andre McCain -- a black Washingtonian, D.C. native, and founder of Halfsmoke, the
restaurant.

As a kid, he and his mom would head to the market at RFK Stadium to get their groceries.

ANDRE MCCAIN
I would always get a chili, cheese and onion half-smoke from the hot dog truck that was
there. So it was pretty much a ritual on a regular basis.

PATRICK FORT
After college, Andre went to New York, where he worked in real estate finance.

He spent seven years there, but he hated it. Each day was becoming more boring than the
one before. So he decided to get into the restaurant business.

ANDRE MCCAIN
The first name was gonna be the Hot Dog Shop. Pivoted away from that. The hot dog itself
hasn’t always been cast in the best light. The idea was to try to find a name that was short
and sweet as possible. Preferably one word.
PATRICK FORT
And in 2016, Halfsmoke the restaurant was born.

ANDRE MCCAIN
Yeah, so the half-smoke is D.C.’s first and foremost indigenous food. It’s the Philly
cheesesteak of D.C.

PATRICK FORT
Even though it’s down the block from Ben's, and even though they both sell half-smokes,
there aren’t many more similarities.

RUTH TAM
The half-smoke at Halfsmoke the restaurant is a little different from Ben’s. It’s gotten this
kind of glammy makeover. It even has a name, it’s called the Briggs & Co. And it’s served in
this brioche bun. It’s got a fancy beer cheese and fried onions on top of it.

PATRICK FORT
The menus come in trapper keepers from the 90’s. The food is served in a metal
lunchboxes. And your check is delivered in VHS cases for disney movies.

ANDRE MCCAIN
And there’s board games all around the restaurant and there’s a photobooth. Really trying
to create a 360 feeling of what it’s like to be in a place that’s focused on fun and happiness.

PATRICK FORT
Before we met Andre, it was easy to assume Halfsmoke was trying to appeal more to diners
who cared more about Instagram experiences than preserving D.C. culture. But I think we
missed the point. Like, where we saw a millennial playground, Andre saw nostalgia and
memories and home

ANDRE MCCAIN
The restaurant is designed as a reprieve from some of the day to day realities of everyday
life. It’s an opportunity for you to kick back, relax and spend time with friends. And really just
get back to that fun time as a kid.

PATRICK FORT
I came out of that conversation feeling a lot differently than I expected I would.

RUTH TAM
What did you think going in?

PATRICK FORT
I think I had this conception in my mind that he was gonna be like, some guy not from D.C.
who was just kind of capitalizing on half-smokes and the history of them. While he’s doing
things his own way, he cares so much about history and doing right by it.

RUTH TAM
Anybody who doesn’t know Andre would think, oh, they’re taking something that’s classic
D.C. and revamping it for a new audience. For some people, that might be exciting. For
others, it might give them an odd sense of unease, and for other people, it just might not
matter at all.

The fact that people are critiquing the differences between his place and Ben’s, potentially,
shows that people care. And he’s okay with that.

ANDRE MCCAIN
When it comes to the half-smoke, or when it comes to protecting the history of D.C. and not
disrupting the old for the new, people take that seriously. And I think that’s a good place to
be. You do have to be so respectful of the culture. And it does, in some ways, create a level
of responsibility to not disrupt but also help move things forward.

PATRICK FORT
Why were we so hung up on Andre having to fall in the neat box of either old or new D.C.?

RUTH TAM
Well I think in D.C., we’re used to either-ors. We’re used to having our identity split and for
two truths to exist alongside each other.

D.C. is a historically black town --Chocolate City.

PATRICK FORT
Yeah, but now it’s visibly whiter.

RUTH TAM
But’s it’s the nation’s capital and at the same time, a really small town.

PATRICK FORT
Right, it’s this seat of power. Yet, the people who live in the District are struggling with
representation and equity at a basic level.

RUTH TAM
As we found out, this “tug of war” over city identity is happening all over D.C., but the two
sides aren’t mutually exclusive. You can be old D.C. and new D.C., just like the half-smoke.

-----

PATRICK FORT
Dish City is produced by me, Patrick Fort.

RUTH TAM
And me, Ruth Tam. Our editor is Poncie Rutsch.

PATRICK FORT
Our theme music is by the amazing Daniel Peterschmidt. Ben Privot mixes the show.
RUTH TAM
WAMU’s General Manager is JJ Yore. And Andi McDaniel oversees all content.
PATRICK FORT
If you wanna talk to us online, we’re on Twitter and Instagram, @DishCity. And our email is
dishcity at wamu.org.

RUTH TAM
If you wanna talk to us in person, we’ll be grabbing drinks at bars around the District the
Tuesday after each episode drops. We wanna hear from you about what you thought about
this episode and meet you all in person. So, give us all your hot food takes IRL. Details
about our events are at Dish City dot org.

PATRICK FORT
Mild food takes welcome, cold food takes also welcome.

RUTH TAM
Also welcome.

PATRICK FORT
if you love Dish City, which is --hot take, probably-- tell a friend about it and review us on
your podcast app! It helps future listeners find the show.

RUTH TAM
We’ll be back next week with a new episode of Dish City, so hit that subscribe button! That
way we will be in your queue when you wake up on Thursday.

Thanks, bye.