Arrive Magazine - July/August, 2008

accompaniment: “A cold beer goes real good with a pit beef,” he says. “It’s a special thing.”

D.C. Half-Smoke

Many a visitor to the nation’s capital has puzzled over the mysterious, block-lettered “half-smoke” sign on a street vendor’s cart. Are they selling some kind of barbecue? Cigarettes? Nope, it’s a spicy smoked sausage usually made with both beef and pork—considered the District’s signature dish and perhaps its only native food.

“It’s something you can’t get just any where,” says Travis Hackney, manager of Arlington, Va.’s, Weenie Beenie, about why they’ve been busy grilling up half-smokes at the iconic roadside stand for more than 50 years.

The sausage first made its mark as a popular midcentury breakfast item. In 1958, Ben Ali and his wife, Virginia, changed things up a bit, opening Ben’s Chili Bowl on… U Street in the District.

“Dad’s idea was to take the breakfast sausage and put it on a bun, and it was a hit,” says son Nizam Ali, who today runs the restaurant with his brother Kamal.

Their chili half-smoke is what helped make Ben’s a landmark on “Black Broadway,” the city’s center of black culture. Duke Ellington and Martin Luther King Jr. hung out there, and Bill Cosby has been a fan since the early days—he even held a press conference there in 1985 to celebrate the success of The Cosby Show.

No one really knows why they’re called half-smokes, but theories abound. Maybe because they’re often served sliced in half on a hinge, or perhaps because of the fifty-fifty beef-pork makeup. What’s important is that the locals know what they’re getting.

Says Hackney, “We don’t advertise, so our customers are 90 to 100 percent comeback.”

Beginning this year, the half-smoke will have a whole new audience. The Alis have opened a Ben’s outpost in the new Nationals Park. According to Kamal Ali, “It should be a win-win—a nice statement for the fans and the city.”