Head out of downtown Sevierville on the Parkway toward Pigeon Forge and you pass through the sleepiest stretch of that whole road. A campground, some houses, a little of this and that. Then a Marathon station, with nothing out front to suggest anything is going on behind the pumps.
Tucked in the back of that gas station is Frank Allen Market & Grill, a counter with booths and stools that has been running a flat top since 1961. Locals already loved it when Dolly Parton sang its praises in Southern Living’s June 2010 issue. “Everyone is always looking for a ‘joint’ to eat at that only locals know. Frank Allen’s is a local Sevier County experience I love,” she told the magazine.
Then she named her order. “My favorite is their Slaw Dog, but you’ll have to eat your way through the menu and find your own very favorite treat. Just be sure to tell them Dolly sent you.”
The Slaw Dog Costs About $2.49
A slaw dog is a hot dog buried under coleslaw, with yellow mustard and chopped onions. The Frank Allen version is built on chili, so if you order one “all the way,” the chili is coming whether you planned for it or not.
It has been listed at $2.49, and the specialty dogs run two for $5. Prices at a place like this move around, but not by much.
Nobody involved pretends this is a craft sausage. The dog is not artisanal, the bun is a bun, and the whole thing hits the counter fast. That is the appeal. A woman who could have hired any chef in the world kept telling people to go eat a two-dollar hot dog at a gas station grill in the county where she grew up. She died in Nashville on August 25, 2026, at 80.
She Told Readers To Watch For Her Tour Bus
Five years after the Southern Living piece, Parton brought it up again in Sky, the Delta Airlines in-flight magazine. “They have the best slaw dogs in the county, and you might just see my bus parked there as I pick up lunch,” she said in the 2015 interview.
Any other restaurant on that strip would have rented a billboard the day that quote ran. Frank Allen’s hung two small 8×10 photos of her on the wall above the griddle and left it at that. When TheSmokies.com visited, there was no shrine and no sign out by the road.
Frank Allen Was 13 When He Started Out
Allen got into the grocery business at 13, making deliveries on his bicycle before going to work in his father’s store. He and his wife, Ernestine, opened their own market in 1953 and added the grill eight years later, in 1961. The hot dogs and hamburgers did the rest.
The market moved a couple of times before landing in its current spot inside the Marathon station, where the grill shares the building with an ordinary convenience store full of snacks and drinks. It operates as a Kenjo Market, part of a regional group of gas station stores.
Allen retired in 1997 and handed the business to his daughter and son-in-law. The family sold it in 2017 to a Tennessee gas station convenience store chain. Allen died in October 2021 at the age of 90.
The Cheeseburger Is What Regulars Order
Parton’s slaw dog gets the headlines, but the cheeseburger is the best seller and the thing the grill has actually won trophies for. It has taken The Mountain Press Readers’ Choice award for best cheeseburger in Sevier County year after year, and by 2010 it had won eight straight.
The cheeseburger has been priced at $4.49, the double bacon cheeseburger at $6.89. The most expensive thing on the board is the Super Granddaddy, a two-foot sub packed with five meats and two cheeses, at $7.99. Steak burgers are on there too.
If you are driving in for one item, make it the burger. It is a solid diner-style patty off a flat top that works breakfast and lunch every day, and people who eat there regularly keep coming back for it. Get the slaw dog alongside it, since the specialty dogs run two for $5.
The Rest Of The Menu Is Gloriously Unfussy
Beyond the slaw dog there are Nacho Dogs, Inferno Dogs with jalapeños, Bacon Cheese Dogs, BBQ Dogs, plain hot dogs and corndogs. The Chuckwagon sandwich is built on a country fried-style beef patty. There is a pimento cheese sandwich, because it is Tennessee.
Sides stay in the same lane: onion rings, crinkle-cut fries and coleslaw. In the morning the griddle is loaded with eggs and hashbrowns crowded in next to the burgers and dogs, which tells you what kind of kitchen this is. One surface, everything on it.
Slaw Dogs Came Out Of West Virginia
The style first showed up in West Virginia in the early 1920s and caught on hard during the Great Depression, when hot dogs and cabbage were about the cheapest things a family could put on a plate. It spread across the South from there.
A traditional West Virginia slaw dog carries slaw, yellow mustard, meaty chili and diced sweet onions, which is more or less the Frank Allen build. Getting it right is a balancing act. “The chili and the slaw must be designed to be together, and their taste profiles must be complementary,” Stanton Means of the West Virginia Hot Dog Blog told Atlanta magazine. Sweet slaw works with spicy chili; milder chili needs a subtler slaw.
Different towns defend different versions. Nu-Way Weiners in Macon, Georgia, has been at it since 1916. The Varsity in Atlanta skips the chili entirely and leans on a drier slaw made with minced cabbage, some outer leaves for color and a bit of carrot, so it does not turn the bun to mush. Parts of the Carolinas use a BBQ slaw built on ketchup instead of mayo.
Building One At Home Takes Ten Minutes
You do not need a recipe so much as an order of operations. Grill the dogs until they pick up char marks, warm the split buns on the grill for a minute, then stripe on yellow mustard first so it lands on the dog and not on top of the slaw.
Chili next if you are using it, then the onions, then a heavy scoop of creamy coleslaw over the whole thing. About a cup and a half of slaw covers four dogs. A barbecue version swaps a tablespoon of honey-style BBQ sauce in for the chili, and it is a genuinely good shortcut if you do not have a pot of chili sitting around.
Make the slaw a day ahead if you can. Letting it sit in the fridge an hour or more pulls the mayo, vinegar, sugar and celery seed together instead of tasting like three separate ingredients.
Potatoes And Butter Were Her Other Two Weaknesses
The gas station hot dog is not an outlier. Parton’s favorite food was any kind of potato, baked, fried or mashed. “I’ve never met a spud I didn’t like,” she said in a TikTok tribute to them. Her father was a farmer who grew more potatoes than anything else.
The cookbook she wrote with her sister Rachel Parton George, “Good Lookin’ Cookin’,” reads accordingly, with country potato salad, broiled potato wedges, sweet potato casserole and holiday potatoes. When PureWow asked her to name a favorite condiment, she started with butter, then added cream and bacon grease: “Lots of butter, salt and pepper. Yeah, that’s what makes anything taste good.” The baked potato recipe calls for at least a tablespoon per spud and warns you will need extra.
Her meatloaf runs about two parts beef to one part pork, bound with rolled oats instead of breadcrumbs, with a glaze of ketchup, sugar and mustard. She used to make it for her goddaughter, Miley Cyrus.
Chicken and dumplings was her favorite thing to cook, and she kept her own recipe close. Asked for the recipe by Today in 2022, she declined, saying hers is loaded with secret ingredients and naming only one of them: love. The version that made it into the family cookbook is her sister’s.
Where To Find It, And Whether To Bother
Frank Allen’s Market and Grill sits at 930 Parkway in Sevierville, on your way toward Pigeon Forge and Dollywood. There is no turn lane at the station, so you either drive past and make a U-turn or turn just before it and use the one-lane access road into the back of the lot.
The grill opens at 6 a.m. during the week and shuts down at 5:30 p.m. and at 4 p.m. on Sundays, and it is a breakfast and lunch operation rather than a dinner stop. Hours change, so call before you plan a trip around it.
Go, but go with the right expectations. This is a $2.49 chili-and-slaw dog off a gas station griddle, not a pilgrimage site. What you get is a good cheap hot dog in the county she came from, eaten on a stool at a family grill that has been flipping burgers since 1961. As she once told Elle, a rhinestone shines just as good as a diamond.
