Caption: Hot dog maven - and art buyer - Howard Lorber, bottom right, with hot dog painter Kevin Berlin, above right. Berlin's "Hotdog in the Harbour" is one a series of paintings featuring snack food.

LI Life, ART

An Oil to Go,
Hold the Sauerkraut

Edited by Phil Mintz

Roberta von Schlossberg wasn't quite sure about the painting she and artist Kevin Berlin put in the window of her RVS Fine Art gallery on Job's Lane in Southampton on July 4.

After all, Berlin's oil was of a giant hot dog set against a background of 1930s New York Harbor - part of a series of paintings Berlin has done called "Snacks Over Manhattan." Von Schlossberg's gallery is decidedly more traditional, featuring Long Island landscapes and things like that.

But count on serendipity, in the form of Howard Lorber, walking by just a few moments later. Lorber, who is having a house built in Southampton, is the chairman and chief executive of Westbury-based Nathan's Famous Inc. That's Nathan's as in hot dogs.

"I figured if anyone should own that picture, it should be me," says Lorber, who walked in and bought "Hotdog in the Harbour" on the spot. ("Under $10,000," says von Schlossberg.) It will hang in his office, Lorber says. "It looked like a Nathan's hot dog. It was bigger than the bun."

Actually, says Berlin, the hot dog that was used as a model for the painting came from a vendor on the street by his SoHo studio. It took three tries for the vendor to get the mustard stripe just so.

Von Schlossberg, meanwhile, is so happy with the results she's going to feature Berlin's other "snack" paintings at the gallery Aug. 8-15. Traditional stuff like a bagel over the Chrysler Building, a pickle over the Brooklyn Bridge, a doughnut over City Hall. You get the picture.

--Phil Mintz