Every town has a business that outlasts trends, recessions, and every restaurant concept that opened across the street. In Wake Forest, that business serves hot dogs — and its story starts, improbably, with a movie screen.
How it started: a theater with snacks
In 1916, H.E. Joyner opened a picture house on White Street — the Gem Theatre — showing what a 1919 advertisement in the Wake Forest College newspaper called “high class motion pictures” alongside “ice cream, candies and all good things to eat.” To compete with a rival theater, Joyner expanded: pool tables, then a full lunch counter. The movies eventually left. The lunch counter never did.
The name arrived with the second generation, when H.E.'s son Millard — known to everyone as “Shorty” — took the counter over and gave the place the identity it has carried ever since.
Four generations behind the counter
Shorty's has stayed in the Joyner family the entire time — into a third generation with Bill Joyner, who started working there at eleven years old and once estimated he'd “eaten and made a lot of hot dogs,” and a fourth with his son Chris, who co-owned and ran the restaurant alongside him. When Bill passed away in 2018, the town mourned him the way you mourn an institution's keeper; the restaurant kept grilling.
The room wears its century well: pool tables still in the back, walls packed with a hundred years of memorabilia, and prices that make it the town's most democratic supper. The lore runs deep — golf legend Arnold Palmer frequented Shorty's as a Wake Forest College student and came back to celebrate his 80th birthday there in 2009, and “All in the Family” star Carroll O'Connor is rumored to have picked up his Southern drawl shooting pool in the back room.
The order
The main event is the traditional Southern “red” hot dog — grilled, on a steamed bun, best ordered all the way: homemade chili from a closely guarded family recipe, mustard, and hand-chopped onions. Regulars pair it with crinkle-cut cheese fries and a large sweet tea, or the Arnold Palmer that honors the restaurant's most famous regular.
A century in, each Wake Forest generation makes the same quiet decision: this is where we go. Find Shorty's at 214 S. White Street — hours and details are on their directory listing.
