Charlie Riedel's has been feeding Canandaigua since 1923, and walking up to the order window feels like stepping into a time capsule that someone has been very carefully maintaining for a century. The setup is pure roadside Americana: walk-up windows, a parking lot full of people eating off paper trays on picnic tables, and a menu that has not needed reinvention because it was right the first time. The Texas hots — snappy-cased dogs buried under a proprietary meat sauce — are the order that built the reputation, and they remain the reason most people are standing in line. The hot dogs have that old-school natural casing snap that fast-food chains cannot replicate, and the meat sauce has the kind of seasoning depth that comes from a recipe that has been dialed in over decades, not months.

Beyond the dogs, the hand-dipped soft serve and thick milkshakes are summer essentials, the kind of thing you eat while leaning against your car in the parking lot with no pretense whatsoever. Riedel's has earned FLX Finest recognition for Best Fast Food four years running — Silver in 2022 and 2023, Silver again in 2024, and Gold in 2025 — which tracks with what anyone who has been here already knows: this is the best cheap eat in the northern Finger Lakes. It is not a restaurant. It is not trying to be a restaurant. It is a place where the food is excellent, the prices are absurdly low, and the vibe is purely democratic — families, construction crews, wine tourists, and teenagers all standing in the same line. If you are driving through Canandaigua and you skip this, you made a mistake.