A Missed Culinary Opportunity in "Challengers"

The food-obsessed director clearly did not know Walter's Hot Dog Stand.

“[Director Luca Guadagnino is] foremost an Italian sensualist — an oralist, really…. He seems flummoxed by a place as comfortably devoid of Michelin-star bait as New Rochelle.”

—New York Times art and pop culture critic Wesley Morris on Challengers.

I saw the film Challengers last night. It’s a hugely popular new movie whose premise is that tennis is sex and sex itself a faulty simulacrum of tennis. The only activity that comes close to capturing the intimacy and extreme sensuality of tennis is eating. Morris’s characterization of the film’s director, Luca Guadagnino, as an “oralist” is very much to the point. There are naughty prawns in I Am Love, set in Milan, and a naughty peach in Call Me By Your Name. In Challengers there are naughty churros in a scene set in Palo Alto and a naughty banana in the film’s principal setting, the New Rochelle Challenger Tournament Presented by Phil’s Tiretown.

I don’t know much about tennis (I’ve taken a few lessons), so I can’t weigh in on whether sex is merely an inferior version of tennis. But I do know something about New Rochelle, where I lived to the age of 12. There is no New Rochelle Challenger Tournament. There is no Phil’s Tiretown. The tournament is supposed to take place at a country club, but the only real country club I know of situated in New Rochelle is Wykagyl Country Club, which I used to cut across on my bike riding home from school. It’s a golf club, and though I didn’t know it at the time, Wykagyl did not, in those days, admit members of the Jewish persuasion, so my gleeful trespassing down its hilly greens—once part of Thomas Paine’s farm—was a sort of unconscious rebellion. I don’t recall that Wykagyl had tennis courts, and it certainly doesn’t have a tennis stadium like the one in the film.

I moved away from New Rochelle 54 years ago, so I’m not really up to date on its culinary scene. But Wesley Morris—an art and pop culture critic but not a food critic—is obviously unaware that the world’s greatest hot dogs are sold at Walter’s Hot Dog Stand, just across the border in Mamaroneck, inside a magnificent ersatz-Chinese pagoda dating to 1928. The Michelin-star quality of Walter’s frankfurters is not widely recognized, mainly because the world cannot accept that the world’s greatest hot dog stand would be situated in suburbia and not, say, Coney Island. Nathan’s makes a pretty good hot dog but it can’t hold a candle to the, well, sensuality of a Walter’s hot dog, which is split down the middle, grilled in butter, then placed inside a perfectly toasted bun. It is the equivalent to the prawns in I Am Love and the peach in Call Me By Your Name, and it would have made a perfect prop for Challengers. But Luca Guadagnino clearly failed to do his homework and missed his chance. Double fault!