The gospel music hums overhead while the fryer crackles behind the counter. Customers drift in and out of the narrow diner on Broadway, a place that seems stuck in time.
At one end of the grill, Elisha Evans flips hamburgers with one hand while dropping fries into hot oil with the other. A few stools away, longtime customer Titus Riley waits for his usual order of two chili cheese double hamburgers and talks about the importance of supporting local restaurants.
Outside, Gary has changed dramatically over the past century. Inside Koney King, much of it still feels the same.
“The nostalgia of the place deserves to be what people remember,” owner James Hendricks said. “I didn’t change anything.”
The small restaurant still resembles a vintage diner, holding tightly to the atmosphere and appearance generations of customers remember. Over the years, updates have been made carefully, preserving as much of the restaurant’s original feel as possible.
For Hendricks, preserving Koney King was never just about keeping a restaurant open. It was about protecting a piece of Gary’s identity.
Now 106 years old, the Broadway restaurant is one of the city’s oldest surviving eateries and continues serving the same chili recipe that helped make it a local institution generations ago. In fact, the restaurant’s story stretches back to the early days of Gary itself.
Hendricks, a barber whose shop sits next door, became the restaurant’s fourth caretaker after taking it over from longtime owner Paul Kamanaroff in 2018.
“I’m appreciative of having the opportunity to keep this in our community,” he said. “I grew up in this neighborhood, and I came here as a kid. So, just to be able to continue the legacy going forward has been an honor.”
Transferring the business
The sound of hair clippers and sweeping brooms echoed through Hendricks’ Cut Time Barbershop as he looked up from a client toward the television mounted near his chair. The screen displayed a live camera feed from inside Koney King next door. From his barber chair, he keeps watch over both businesses at once.
The idea of owning the restaurant was brought up to Hendricks over seven years ago. At the time, he was Kamanaroff’s barber as well as friend.
Kamanaroff is the great-nephew of Koney King’s founder, Mike Petroff. Petroff immigrated to the United States, specifically to Gary, in 1914, when he was 21. Gary Works had just been founded a few years beforehand, which generated a lot of work in the area. Not knowing English at the time, he learned it and the city’s culture while working as a foreman in the quarry.
Several years later, Petroff and a friend had saved enough money to open a short-order restaurant that served cheap meals, sandwiches, and short-order lunches. Named Coney Island Lunch, it was located in an alley near Ninth Avenue and Broadway.
As restaurant owners, they sampled other places in the area, and after trying another restaurant’s chili, the owner gave them the recipe. That recipe turned Coney Island Lunch into a chili restaurant and created the legacy known today.
The restaurant gained a lot of popularity for how cheap the meals were: a nickel for a hot dog or coffee, and a dime for a bowl of chili or a hamburger.
In time, Petroff passed the restaurant to his nephew, Pete Kamanaroff, who at the time was running his own restaurant, Indiana Sandwich Shops, in another location three blocks down from 12th Avenue and Broadway. Following his uncle’s traditional menu and flavor, he wanted to continue the legacy he was raised on.
For 20 years, he ran both businesses until handing them to his son, Paul. Like his father, Paul started working in the restaurant at a young age. In February 1969, wanting an easier name to say than Indiana Sandwich Shops, he folded the restaurants under the name Koney King. He ran it for 50 years, following the recipes that his uncle and father taught him.
The current Koney King is located in the longtime home of Coney Island Lunch.
In 2018, Kamanaroff decided to retire, but at the time, he didn’t know what the business’s future would be. A real estate agent approached him about buying the building, but Hendricks also approached him.
At that point, Hendricks had been regularly cutting his landlord’s hair for six years, and they had developed a close relationship. Before becoming his barber, Hendricks had already had a personal relationship with the restaurant owner. He had his first Koney King Chili Dog in 1990, while a freshman at Lew Wallace High School. He remembers the days he’d rush out of school on his lunch break, trying to get to the restaurant. With only an hour break, those days were full of adrenaline.
“[We’d] get out of class and run over here, and when you got here it was packed, so now you got to order your food, get your food, and get back,” he said, laughing. “That’s very vivid to me as an experience growing up, that it never dawned on me that I would own Koney King one day.”
So Kamanaroff gave his friend two conditions: get the money to him within 30 days and learn how to make the chili from scratch. For six weeks, he was the owner’s shadow until he knew everything he needed to know. And from there, a 100-year tradition was passed on.
Koney King now
Hendricks soon faced the challenge of owning both the restaurant and the barbershop, but he wasn’t worried.
Having been a barber for over two decades, he knows how to run a business and is excited about this new adventure, as well as about preserving Gary’s history.
If you walk into Koney King now, it still looks like it did decades ago, something Hendricks thought about when he took over. And that’s what many like about the restaurant now.
Riley, the longtime customer, said he would visit the restaurant several times for lunch when he was working, but now that he’s retired, he enjoys waking up to get his food from the restaurant.
“I like the flavor, and the recipe is the same,” he said. A firm advocate for local restaurants, he believes that more of them need support. “We gotta have it just to keep the community going.”
As he sat there waiting for his order, gospel music blasted through the restaurant’s overhead speakers. Evans called out orders over the music as she walked around the counter to serve customers waiting on the back wall.
“I came here to help with planning, and I’ve been here ever since,” she joked. For the past seven years, she’s helped Hendricks open the restaurant to the Gary community. “He’s a good guy.”
She enjoys watching the different customers come in, especially those who have been coming for years. Some she knows their orders before they walk in the door.
“I pretty much know everybody that comes through the door,” she said. “It’s a married couple, and they’ve been married like 70-some years. Every anniversary, she wants to come to Koney King. When I see them walk through the door, I already know they’re going to want four chili dogs, one fry, and two Diet Pepsis.”
When she starts to get swarmed by customers, Hendricks or others grab gloves and start making chili dogs, hamburgers, or ham-on-the-bone sandwiches to get through the rush.
Similar to Petroff and Kamanaroff, he hopes to continue the tradition of keeping the business in the family and in Gary.
“We are all here as part of keeping the tradition alive,” he said about his children and grandkids being involved in the business. “I respect the legacy [of Koney King] and the things that we do moving forward are just about balancing it out, so we just stay within the guidelines that were already created.”
