There’s a Marathon station on the Parkway in Sevierville, Tennessee, sitting on a stretch of road most drivers blow straight past on their way to the outlet malls and Dollywood traffic. No billboard. No neon sign screaming about a celebrity. Walk past the drink coolers and the snack racks and you find a flat top grill, a couple of booths, and a menu that a customer from 1961 would still recognize. Dolly Parton, a woman who could have hired any chef on the planet to cook her dinner, kept coming back for a hot dog with coleslaw on it.
The Slaw Dog She Named Out Loud
The place is Frank Allen’s Market & Grill, and Parton didn’t leave anybody guessing about how she felt. She told Southern Living in 2010 that everyone is always hunting for a joint only locals know about, and that Frank Allen’s was a local Sevier County experience she loved. “My favorite is their Slaw Dog, but you’ll have to eat your way through the menu and find your own very favorite treat,” she said. “Just be sure to tell them Dolly sent you.”
She said it again five years later, and got more specific. Talking to Sky, the Delta Air Lines in-flight magazine, in 2015, she said Frank Allen’s had the best slaw dogs in the county and that you might spot her bus parked out front while she picked up lunch. Parton died Aug. 25 at the age of 80, her estate announced. The hot dog she talked up for at least 15 years is still on the board.
What A Slaw Dog Actually Is
The build at Frank Allen’s is a steamed hot dog buried under coleslaw, chili, chopped onions and yellow mustard. Order it “all the way” and the chili is part of the deal. If you’re from north of Virginia and the cabbage part sounds wrong to you, think of it the way a lot of Southerners do: it’s cabbage on a hot dog, same basic idea as sauerkraut, just creamier and sweeter.
The price is the part that makes the whole thing make sense. A slaw dog runs $2.49, and the specialty dogs go two for $5. That’s a full lunch for the price of a large coffee somewhere else in town. The dog itself is not artisanal, it wasn’t smoked over hickory by a guy with a certificate from Bavaria, and nobody there is pretending otherwise. It’s a hot dog, done right, sold cheap.
Slaw Dogs Came Out Of West Virginia
Tennessee didn’t invent this. Slaw dogs started in West Virginia in the 1920s, and they took off during the Great Depression because hot dogs and cabbage were about the cheapest things a family could put on a plate. From there they spread across the South and turned into a regional style with real local pride attached.
There are variations depending on where you stop. Some spots use a BBQ slaw made with ketchup instead of mayo. Some skip the chili entirely, which is a legitimate way to eat one and, honestly, easier to hold. The classic version, the one Parton was ordering, keeps all four toppings on there at once.
Frank Allen Started With A Bicycle
Frank Allen got into the grocery business at 13, making deliveries on his bicycle before going to work in his father’s store. In 1953, he and his wife Ernestine opened their own market. The grill came eight years later, in 1961, and that’s when the hot dogs and hamburgers that made the place famous started coming off the flat top.
The market moved a couple of times before landing in the back of the Marathon station where it sits now, at 930 Parkway. Allen retired in 1997 and handed the business to his daughter and son-in-law. He died in 2010 at 90. The family sold the business in 2017 to a Tennessee gas station convenience store chain, and it operates as a Kenjo Market, part of a regional group of gas station markets. The name stayed. So did the menu.
The Cheeseburger Is The Actual Best Seller
Parton put the slaw dog on the map, but the item that moves fastest is the cheeseburger. It has won The Mountain Press readers’ choice award for best cheeseburger in Sevier County year after year, a run that stretches back close to two decades. It’s a straightforward diner burger off a griddle, which in a tourist corridor full of themed restaurants and pancake houses is a small miracle.
The cheeseburger costs $4.49. A double bacon cheeseburger is $6.89. If you’re driving through with somebody who refuses to eat a hot dog with slaw on it, that’s your answer, and it’s arguably the smarter order.
The Two-Foot Sub Nobody Warned You About
The most expensive item on the board is the Super Granddaddy Sandwich at $7.99: a two-foot-long sub packed with five meats and two cheeses. It’s the kind of order you split, or the kind you regret alone in your car in the parking lot. Either way, $7.99 for twenty-four inches of sandwich is a number worth writing down.
The rest of the menu is deep for a gas station. There are corn dogs, plain hot dogs, Nacho Dogs, Inferno Dogs loaded with jalapeños, Bacon Cheese Dogs and BBQ Dogs. There’s a pimento cheese sandwich and a Chuckwagon built on a country-fried-style beef patty. Sides are onion rings, crinkle-cut fries and coleslaw, plus steak burgers if you want something between a burger and a plate dinner.
There Is No Dolly Shrine Inside
Anywhere else on that strip, a Dolly Parton endorsement would be up on billboards from Sevierville to Gatlinburg with the quote printed in ten-foot letters. At Frank Allen’s, there are two small 8×10 photos of her on the wall above the griddle, headshot-style, the sort of thing you’d walk past without noticing. That restraint is a big part of why the place still feels like what she described in the first place.
Don’t plan a trip around spotting her, and don’t go expecting late-night hours either. The market opens at 6 a.m. and closes at 5:30 p.m. during the week, with Sunday running 6 a.m. to 4 p.m. Hours are subject to change. This is a breakfast-and-lunch operation with a regulars’ crowd, a counter where you can talk to whoever’s working the grill, and a handful of booths.
Getting There Is Its Own Small Test
The station sits between downtown Sevierville and the Pigeon Forge city limits near the spur, on one of the least developed pieces of that road. There’s no turn lane right at the gas station if you’re headed toward Pigeon Forge. You either drive past and make a U-turn, or turn just before it and take a one-lane access road around to the back of the parking lot. Plenty of people have missed it entirely and kept driving.
The Rest Of Dolly’s Cheap Eats Résumé
A gas station hot dog wasn’t an outlier for her. Parton told Insider in 2022 that she and her husband would hit Taco Bell, and she had a specific order: the Taco Supreme in a soft shell, with the sour cream, because the hard shells fall apart when you’re eating in the car. She also loved the Mexican Pizza, which the chain had discontinued and then brought back in May 2022.
At Dollywood, she said in January 2025 that she couldn’t leave the park without funnel cakes, and that if she was in her bus or up in The Dolly Suite she’d send somebody to fetch them. She told TODAY.com in 2025 that she needed something with potatoes every single day, whether that meant a baked potato, mashed potatoes or french fries. Asked by PureWow to name her favorite condiment, she said butter, then clarified: lots of butter.
Is It Worth Pulling Over For
Yes, with your expectations set correctly. You’re not getting a life-changing hot dog. You’re getting a good one for $2.49, made the way this part of the country has made them for a century, in a room where the fryer and the coffee pot are about eight feet apart. If somebody handed you the same slaw dog at a food festival for nine bucks you’d feel cheated. At this price, in this building, it lands exactly right.
The smart order is one slaw dog and one cheeseburger, split with whoever you’re driving with. The dog is the story, the burger is the award winner, and together they’ll run you under ten dollars. Skip the Super Granddaddy unless there are three of you.
What Parton was really recommending wasn’t a recipe. She grew up poor in Sevier County, built a theme park a few miles up the road, and could have eaten anywhere in the world every night of her life. She kept naming a hot dog at a Marathon station instead. That’s not a food take. That’s a woman telling you where she’s from, and the hot dog happens to be good too.
