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Jane and Michael Stern, writing in 500 Things to Eat Before it's Too Late, note that "there's only one place to start [to pinpoint the top Coney Islands], and that is Detroit. Nowhere is the passion for them more intense." James Schmidt, in a debate at the 2018 National Fair Food Summit, noted that "Detroit is synonymous with the Coney Dog: you simply cannot have one without the other."
The most influential chili dog stands in Michigan are the American Coney Island and Lafayette Coney Island restaurants located next door to each other in downtown Detroit. The American Coney Island restaurant was founded in 1914 or 1917 by Greek immigrant Constantine "Gust" Keros. Gust brought his brother over from Greece and helped him open the Lafayette Coney Island restaurant next door. There is a fierce rivalry between the two restaurants.
The Coney Island developed in Michigan is a natural-casing beef or beef and pork European-style Wiener Würstchen (Vienna sausage) of German origin, topped with a beef heart-based sauce, one or two stripes of yellow mustard and diced or chopped onions. The variety is a fixture in Flint, Detroit, Jackson, Kalamazoo, and southeastern Michigan.
Detroit style sauce is a bean-less chili sauce, differing from the chili dogs they offer only in the lack of beans. National has most of its restaurants on the east side of the city, and Kerby's and Leo's have the bulk of their restaurants on the west side of the Detroit area.
Flint style is characterized by a dry hot dog topping made with a base of ground beef heart, which is ground to a consistency of fine-ground beef. Some assert that in order to be an "authentic" Flint coney, the hot dog must be a Koegel coney and the sauce by Angelo's, which opened in 1949.
Jackson style uses a topping of either ground beef or ground beef heart, onions and spices. This meat sauce is applied on a quality hot dog in a steamed bun and then topped with diced or chopped onions and a stripe of mustard. The Todoroffs' restaurants were some of the earlier locations for Jackson coneys beginning in 1914. However, those locations are now closed.
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