The Missing Link
We like to think the half-smoke is D.C.'s indigenous street food. So why don't we know anything about it?
Cover Story
The first half-smoke I ever tried came off a downtown D.C. vendor cart at the corner of 5th and F Streets NW. I was relatively new to Washington at the time, and yet I’d already heard that this sausage was exclusively a D.C. thing. I’d even gathered from a few recent D.C. transplants that I’d never make it as a local until I’d sampled a few half-smokes. Eating processed meat struck me as a particularly lame path to D.C. cred. But it cost only $2.25, chips and soda included.
What the vendor passed me was a plump, gelatinous frank with a circumference nearly twice that of a typical hot dog. On the vendor’s recommendation, I had it smothered in mustard and diced onions. At first bite it seemed to taste no different from your everyday dirty-water dog, but as I worked my way down the frank, I was hit with more and more spice. In the emulsified beef I could see the tiny culprits: Flakes of what I figured was red pepper.
Since then I’ve eaten more half-smokes than I can count—off carts, at local greasy spoons, out of butcher shops—and yet I don’t think I’ve ever been served a half-smoke identical to that first one. In fact, many of the half-smokes I’ve eaten barely resembled one another. And the more vendors and half-smoke lovers I chatted up, the more D.C. grillmen whose ears I bent, and the more regional meatpackers I called, the further I got from a firm definition of the half-smoke.
... Continued 
Issue of Jan. 26, 2007
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