40 years ago this Saturday, when the Pinellas Beaches looked much different, a young crane operator named Dan Casey left his morning shift helping to build a Tampa Bay bridge and raced to the north end of St. Pete Beach, where he opened his hot dog stand for the first time. All he and his future wife Diana had was a rented refrigerator, a steam table, and a Vienna Hot Dog banner, along with his passion for hospitality.
It was Independence Day of 1986, and Casey hoped hot dogs would be the perfect offering for locals and tourists alike on the beaches for the 4th. By the end of the day, he totaled $86 in sales, an appropriate number, if not a little lower than he may have liked. That $86 in hot dogs became the foundation of a real-life American Dream and the starting point for what are now two of St. Pete Beach’s most iconic restaurants, 1200 Chophouse and Snapper’s Sea Grill.
Just as Casey took a chance on his hot dog stand, his story begins like so many others in this country, with a family arriving on American shores dreaming of a better and more prosperous future. Casey’s maternal grandfather immigrated to the United States from Milan, Italy in the late 1930s. A chef by trade, he worked at Chicago’s famed Drake Hotel before opening his own lunch-counter restaurant on Rush Street serving factory workers. Today, Casey still treasures some of his grandfather’s original pots, pans, and knife-sharpening tools.
That passion for hospitality carried through the generations down to Casey, inspiring the St. Pete Beach hot dog stand that opened some 50 years later. And that hot dog stand was just the beginning for Casey’s culinary journey…