The hot dog costs a couple of dollars. That is not the interesting part.
The interesting part is that you can buy it at 214 S. White Street, which is the same address where H.E. Joyner started selling snacks in 1916, and that the man who takes your money is his great-grandson.
Shorty’s Famous Hot Dogs has been in continuous operation on the same block for more than a hundred years. Woodrow Wilson was president when it opened. The town had a college in it then, and would for another forty years, before Wake Forest College packed up for Winston-Salem in 1956 and took the name with it. Shorty’s outlasted the college. It outlasted the Depression, two world wars, the collapse of the local cotton economy, and the long stretch when downtown Wake Forest was mostly empty storefronts. It is still open six days a week.
It started as a movie theater
This is the detail most people get wrong or never learn. Shorty’s did not begin as a restaurant.
It began as a picture house. H.E. Joyner opened a movie theater in 1916, and like theater operators everywhere, he figured out that people watching a film get hungry. So he started selling food. Then a competing theater opened in town, and Joyner needed a reason for people to pick his room over the other one. He added pool tables. He added a lunch counter.
The competition worked out. The screen came down at some point and never went back up. The pool tables stayed. So did the counter, and so did the food that was supposed to be the side business.
If you want to understand why Shorty’s feels the way it does, that history is the answer. It was never designed as a restaurant with a dining room and a host stand and a concept. It was designed as a room where people already were, with food added because people were already there. A century later it still functions that way. The building is narrow and dim. The stools face the grill. The original lunch menu hangs on the wall so you can see what a hot dog used to cost.
Four generations of Joyners
Chris Joyner runs it now, alongside his father, Bill. That makes Chris the fourth generation of his family behind the same counter.
Restaurants do not usually do this. The National Restaurant Association’s figures on closure rates are grim in any given year, and the odds of a single-location, family-owned lunch counter surviving four generational handoffs in the same building are close to nonexistent. There is no franchise model here, no private equity, no second location. There is a family and a grill.
Ask longtime customers what keeps them coming and almost nobody leads with the food. One customer wrote on the restaurant’s own site that she was raised eating at Shorty’s and hopes to raise her own kids on the same bar stools. Another said the staff greets her with open arms after years away. That is a specific kind of loyalty, and it does not come from a menu.
What you actually order
Southern red hot dogs, which is the thing to get. Shorty’s serves traditional Jesse Jones reds, grilled, plus a Nathan’s all-beef option that has developed its own following. The standard build is mustard, hand-chopped onions, and chili, on a steamed bun.
The chili is a homemade recipe the family has never published. This is not a marketing line. Multiple write-ups over the years have tried and failed to get the details, and the Joyners consistently decline. It goes well on essentially everything they serve, which they will tell you themselves.
Beyond the dogs there are burgers, homemade sandwiches, breakfast sandwiches, and canned Campbell’s soup served with crackers, which is exactly as unpretentious as it sounds. The fresh-squeezed lemonade is worth ordering, and it is better as an Arnold Palmer.
Hours are limited and worth checking before you drive over. They open at 10:30 most mornings and close mid-afternoon Monday through Thursday, run later on Friday, close at 3 on Saturday, and are shut on Sunday. Show up at 2:45 on a Tuesday and you may be eating alone. Show up at noon on a Friday and you will be waiting.
Why it matters to the town
Wake Forest counted 47,601 residents at the 2020 census. The Census Bureau’s 2023 estimate put it at 54,337. That is roughly seven thousand new neighbors in three years, most of them arriving from somewhere else, into new construction, on the south and west sides of town.
A place like Shorty’s is how a town keeps a thread back to what it was. The reviews on Yelp and Tripadvisor are full of the same sentiment written a hundred different ways: this is the kind of place you want your kids to say they grew up going to. One reviewer put the survival math plainly, noting that a hundred-year-old restaurant has to be either very good or very lucky, and luck does not usually last that long in this business.
Shorty’s is not a museum and does not act like one. The prices have gone up since the menu on the wall was current. But the room is the room, the family is the family, and on a weekday at lunch you will find retirees, contractors, high schoolers, and somebody’s grandmother all eating the same thing at the same counter.
You cannot manufacture that. You can only fail to tear it down.
Shorty’s Famous Hot Dogs, 214 S. White Street, Wake Forest. shortysfamoushotdogs.com