13 Things Ohioans Do at a Cookout That Confuses Everyone From Out of State

It’s football season in Ohio, and a cookout invitation doesn’t necessarily mean one last goodbye to summer.

Around here, the grill still has work to do.

If you’re joining from out of state, you’ll soon discover that the locals have their own idea of how a fall afternoon together should go.

These are the things Ohioans do at a cookout that confuse everyone from out of state.

1. “Pop,” Not “Soda”

Many cookout guests reach into the cooler and ask for a pop, not a soda or a Coke.

An online survey tracking regional drink words has logged more than 23,000 responses from Ohio, and 83% of them picked pop.

It’s pop, full stop.

Ask for a soda at a cookout in Columbus, and you’ll get a polite stare.

Hosts will still hand one over, then keep calling it pop for the rest of the afternoon.

2. Cheese Coneys on the Grill

Cincinnati-area cooks top a cookout hot dog with chili, mustard, onion, and shredded cheddar instead of the usual ketchup squeeze.

That combination has a name: A cheese coney.

Cincinnati chili itself traces back to Greek immigrants, and it leans on cinnamon and clove the way a Mediterranean stew would, not the chili much of the country expects.

A visitor biting into a cheese coney waiting for smoky barbecue heat gets a spiced meat sauce instead.

It still works.

3. Grippo’s Bar-B-Q Chips

A bag of Grippo’s Bar-B-Q chips sits next to the potato salad at many Cincinnati-area cookouts.

The seasoning leaves a peppery powder that coats every finger in the bag.

Angelo Grippo started the company in Cincinnati in 1919.

A visitor who grabs the bag expecting a mild potato chip gets a mouthful of pepper heat instead.

Some bags run hotter.

4. Montgomery Inn on the Ribs

Grillers near Cincinnati brush their cookout ribs and chicken with Montgomery Inn barbecue sauce straight from a bottle in the fridge door.

The restaurant opened in 1951 in the Cincinnati suburb of Montgomery.

The sauce stayed inside the restaurant’s walls before 1990, when the family started bottling it for grocery shelves.

Today the sauce sits in more than 1,500 stores across the Midwest and East Coast.

Ask an out-of-stater to pass the barbecue sauce at a cookout, and they’ll grab whatever red bottle they recognize.

That’s the wrong bottle.

5. Metts, Not Bratwurst

At a cookout around Cincinnati, people throw a mett on the grill, not a bratwurst.

A mett is a smoked pork sausage seasoned with garlic, pepper, and mustard seed, a recipe the city’s German butchers built.

A bratwurst usually goes onto the grate fresh and pale.

The first bite tells the difference.

Order a “brat” at a cookout near Hamilton County and a host may hand over a mett anyway, then explain the difference once it’s already on your plate.

6. Cleveland’s Brown Mustard

In Cleveland, cooks squeeze a spicy brown mustard onto their cookout hot dogs instead of the plain yellow kind.

Joseph Bertman’s ballpark mustard reached fans at League Park in the late 1920s.

As of 2025, it was still served at Progressive Field.

A visitor who packed French’s for the trip gets politely overruled.

Bertman’s, not French’s.

The yellow bottle stays zipped in the cooler bag.

7. Polish Boy

The Polish Boy turns up at backyard cookouts near Cleveland: Grilled kielbasa piled with french fries, coleslaw, and barbecue sauce, all stuffed into one bun.

The sandwich grew out of Cleveland’s Black barbecue cooks blending Southern cooking with the tastes of the city’s Eastern European neighborhoods.

An out-of-stater who walks up expecting a plain hot dog off the grill doesn’t see one coming.

A first bite gets messy fast.

Two hands help.

Utensils exist, but nobody at the picnic table reaches for them.

8. City Chicken With No Chicken

Families near Cleveland still bring city chicken to a cookout’s picnic table, and the dish contains no chicken at all.

It’s pork or veal cubes threaded on a wooden skewer, breaded, and fried or baked to look like a drumstick.

The dish is said to date to the Great Depression, when pork often cost less than chicken.

Cleveland-born chef Michael Symon revived the dish as a pork tenderloin recipe on his cooking show.

Cleveland-area grocery stores have long sold city chicken packages with the skewers included.

A visitor asking where the chicken went gets a shrug back.

9. Toledo’s Hungarian Dog

In Toledo, hosts bring a Hungarian hot dog to the cookout grill, a Hungarian sausage halved down to hot-dog length and topped with a spiced chili sauce.

Tony Packo, the son of Hungarian immigrants, invented the sandwich in 1932 on Toledo’s East Side to keep it affordable during the Depression.

Toledo native Jamie Farr later name-dropped the restaurant repeatedly as Corporal Klinger on M*A*S*H.

Nothing like a coney.

An out-of-stater expecting a plain frank gets a different sausage, with a chili sauce unlike anything ladled on a coney downstate.

10. Tournament-Grade Cornhole

Many cookout cornhole games run on cancellation rules, exact scoring, and regulation board distance.

Every toss counts.

Nobody’s tossing bags just to pass the time.

The American Cornhole Organization formed in Cincinnati in 2005, one of the earliest groups to turn the backyard game into organized competition.

A visitor who lobs a bag underhand for fun quickly learns somebody is keeping score.

11. Cutthroat Euchre

A Euchre game breaks out at the picnic table among guests once the cookout food settles, partners across from each other, cards slapped down hard.

Partners only.

Euchre runs strongest through a stretch of the Midwest that includes Ohio, sometimes called the Euchre Belt.

The game turns on the bowers, two jacks that outrank even the ace.

An out-of-stater asked to partner up usually just watches the first hand instead.

12. Buckeyes for Dessert

Cookout hosts set a plate of buckeyes next to the pie, a peanut butter fudge ball dipped partway in chocolate.

The shape leaves a circle of peanut butter showing, matching the nut of the state tree.

Ohio cooks are credited with shaping the candy into that half-dipped look sometime in the 1960s, and it stuck as a staple around Ohio State football season.

A first-time visitor usually assumes it’s a fancy truffle.

Not a truffle.

It’s peanut butter fudge with a nickname.

13. Kickoff Pause

When the Buckeyes kick off, everyone pauses the whole cookout.

The grill smoke keeps drifting while every eye locks on a phone or a TV wheeled onto the porch.

Ohio State hosts Maryland at Ohio Stadium as part of its home schedule this fall, and on a game Saturday, conversation drops to almost nothing at kickoff.

Fans shush anyone who asks a question mid-drive, no apology included.

The stare says everything.

Ask again after the next commercial break.