Anyone who had the opportunity to grow up in the 1970s and 1980s in Yugoslavia surely remembers one of the symbols of that era – the red kiosk that served various purposes, from grocery stores, newsstands,
and pastry shops to cable car stations in the mountains and even border police booths. However, the most famous use was probably for selling the “most delicious” hot dogs in the world.
The Belgrade Agricultural Combine was the largest enterprise of the socialist era, with enormous production and food capacities. In the late 1960s, the company’s leaders came up with the idea of selling
food on the streets. Fortunately, for many Belgrade residents, a competition was announced under the name “Belgrade Kiosk,” inviting architects to turn this idea into reality.
In 1967, a project by a young Slovenian architect named Saša J. Mächtig won the competition. It featured plastic kiosks, known by the technical name K67 (K for kiosk, 67 for the year they were designed). They could be placed individually or as a united composition, and were proposed in several colors, including blue, white, yellow, and red.
Hot Dogs in a Bun
Although wooden structures preceded it, the red kiosk took all the fame upon its appearance. The concept of selling hot dogs and sausages on the streets came to life overnight in 1967. The kiosk was brightly red, with the famous words “Hot Dogs in a Bun” written in white.
Soon, it became an essential meeting place for elementary and high school students in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and it marked the beginning of fast food sales in Belgrade and beyond. The process was as follows: you would order a hot dog in a bun, the worker would slice the bun in half, use metal tongs to take a hot sausage out of a pot, place it in the not-so-fresh bun, and ask the famous question, “Mustard?” If the answer was yes, you would receive diluted Centroproizvod mustard, and everything would be wrapped in thin crinkly paper with the printed PKB (Belgrade Agricultural Combine) logo. You could also choose to have a yogurt in a pink triangular package.
Despite all of this, many people still remember those hot dogs as the most delicious, firmly believing that not even their mothers, grandmothers, or aunts could make them as well as the workers in the red kiosks… It was truly a different taste that cannot be surpassed even today… This pleasure cost Belgrade residents 6 dinars in 1975, and hot dogs were usually ordered in pairs. Just a few years later, the price increased to 35 dinars, and they could also be paid for with JTO (Yugoslav hot meal) vouchers.
Kiosks in MoMA
The kiosks were present on the streets until the mid-1980s, but the exact moment of their final disappearance is not known. They evidently succumbed to the pressure of the emerging new fast food options, such as burgers and sandwiches, and slowly withdrew from the scene… However, the quality of Mächtig’s design received international recognition—the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York included K67 in its prestigious collection in the early 1970s.
Our famous writer and Belgrade enthusiast Momo Kapor wrote in his text “PKB Nostalgia”: “We traveled the world and tried all kinds of sausages, starting with Carniolan sausages on Belgrade-Ljubljana express trains. We tried spicy Hungarian sausages, the best French ones, and German Würstele, London’s Cumberland sausages with the taste of boiled straw at the Portobello Road flea market, and New York hot
dogs with sauerkraut – in vain! None of the sausages in the world could even come close to PKB’s.”
