Hot Doug's, Jim's, Fluky's... At Least They Get Food Right
My favorite hot dog place, Hot Doug's, was reviewed in the NY Times. After living, visiting, and eating in various cities, I still believe Chicago has the best tasting food. I loved NYC for the diversity and high-end food... love its delis, pizza joints, Chinese fast food, Japanese cuisine, various fusion restaurants, etc. Japanese and Korean restaurants in Los Angeles are unmatched in the U.S. Of course, I'm biased because I love meat and Chicago is a city of high-fat, high cholesterol foods, especially steaks, ribs, burgers, and by-products. Anyway, here's the article:
Stand-Up Food in a City of Big Appetites
THE NEW YORK TIMES
By R. W. APPLE Jr.
April 14, 2004
CHICAGO
WHEN Doug Sohn finished his culinary studies at Kendall College in suburban Evanston a few years ago, he decided to get into regional food. He might have opened a steakhouse — Chicago is one of the world's great beef towns — or a nostalgic meatloaf-and-mashed-potatoes palace, for that matter.
But instead he took a road much less traveled. He opened a hot-dog stand and called it Hot Doug's.
Mr. Sohn's place of business is more than it seems at first. In his irreverent moments, of which he has many, Mr. Sohn describes it as an encased-meats emporium. Rightly so. It serves a fine Chicago red hot, about which more in due course, but also what you might describe as canine nouvelle cuisine. At Doug's you can order a veggie dog or a kangaroo sausage if you like.
What, you might well ask if you don't know Chicago, is so regional about hot dogs? Pink's on La Brea in Los Angeles does a great dog, and people in Detroit swear by the chili dogs at the Lafayette. The corn dogs at the Texas State Fair are good, too, though not as good as Texans claim, naturally. Katz's and Gray's Papaya in New York serve classic kosher dogs, and a place in Mamaroneck called Walter's, which I used to frequent years ago while unsuccessfully courting one of the fairest damsels in nearby Larchmont, may top the whole list.
But no place else this side of Frankfurt has a frankfurter stand every three or four blocks, as Chicago does. And no other place anywhere has a catechism of condiments as rigorously defined as Chicago's. A proper Chicago hot dog must be served on a warmed poppy-seed bun (preferably from Rosen's bakery). It must be dressed with a crisp pickle spear, a sweetish fluorescent green relish, a slice or wedge of raw tomato, some chopped onions (or very occasionally grilled onions), a dab or two of yellow mustard, a dusting of celery salt and two or three hot little green chilies, which Chicagoans for some reason always call sport peppers.
All of the above. Absolutely no substitutions. And no ketchup, please. Ever. Your true Chicagoan recoils from a ketchup-smeared hot dog the way your true New Yorker loathes melted Swiss cheese on a pastrami or corned beef sandwich. There are at least 1,800 hot-dog stands in Chicago, according to the people at Vienna Beef, which supplies most of them.
This is a blue-collar city — "city of the big shoulders," as Carl Sandburg called it — and it loves its proletarian food: high-fat breakfasts, deep-dish pizzas, pork barbecue, Italian beef sandwiches and fried fresh-water fish. Hot dogs come first, however, partly for historical reasons, although price and portability are also factors.
My wife, Betsey, and I started a recent round of dog tasting at the Vienna Beef Factory Store on Damen Avenue. The company's principal product was introduced at the Columbian Exposition in 1893 by its founders, a pair of brothers newly arrived from Vienna, then the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. That accounts for the hint of paprika that flavors Vienna Beef dogs, along with more than a hint of garlic. It also makes them wieners, strictly speaking, not frankfurters — a wiener being a sausage, or anything else, from Wien, or Vienna.
As she tonged a few prime specimens from a water-filled well, the server told Betsey, "Boil your water, turn it off, drop in the hot dogs and let them cook." That way, she explained, you will avoid the dreaded problem of burst casings.
To tell the truth, we had trouble finding a bad dog — there were none at Wiener's Circle, where rowdy late-night weekend crowds gather to soak up the beer consumed earlier; or at Fluky's, which claims to have invented the salad-laden dog on Maxwell Street in Depression-ridden 1929, when it sold for a nickel; or at Poochie's char-dog haven in Skokie, or at Doug's either.
The only real disappointment came at O'Hare Airport as we headed home. Betsey could not resist trying just one more dog (for breakfast). For her three bucks, she got a soggy, tasteless mess and heaved it into the garbage.
In the traditional category — poached sausage with the works — we gave the prize to the Factory Store, which served us a perfect self-basting sandwich, whose hot dog delivered a meaty burst of juice as its taut casing burst. The flavors of each condiment, and the red hot itself, danced in our mouths. Our friend Bill Rice, the esteemed Chicago food writer, who came along to navigate, announced after a bite or two, "It's like tasting Guinness in Dublin."
Doug's, of course, was hors classe. A converted storefront in Roscoe Village, a middle-class residential area on the North Side, it was jam-packed at 3 o'clock on a Saturday afternoon, with a line out the door. Mr. Sohn, manning a counter at the back, scribbled order after order, calling them out to cooks staffing the stoves in a minuscule kitchen behind him. More than 250 people ate lunch that day before Mr. Sohn, who likes to spend the evenings with his family, closed down his shop at 4 p.m.
When I asked him how old he was, the slight, owlish proprietor replied, "I'm 42, but my knees are 60."
Betsey quickly decided on a Chicago classic, then busied herself with her duties as supply sergeant — collecting paper napkins for everyone, wiping the table clean, and rounding up salt and pepper shakers. Ever the Francophile, I went for a Calvados-infused smoked duck sausage with citrus-mustard cream (I'm not kidding here, folks). Mr. Rice couldn't decide between a roasted red pepper chicken sausage and a mint-garlic lamb dog adorned with tapenade and feta.
So he sought the expert counsel of Mr. Sohn, who answered, like a bistro-keeper pushing the gigot: "Hey, it's spring. Why not take the lamb?"
Delicious and instantly consumed as they all were, they were not quite as ravishing as the hand-cut French fries cooked in duck fat. Old gold in color, each fry was a different shape and a different texture. The little ones were crisp and chewy; the big ones were fleecy inside, almost soufflé-like.
The last stop on the sausage tour was a concrete-block building surrounded by rubble-filled lots, just yards from the roaring traffic on the Dan Ryan Expressway. This melancholy establishment, where the cooks inside pass the food out to customers through slit windows, is all that remains of Maxwell Street's once-thriving restaurant culture and of Jim's, where the famous Chicago Polish sausage was invented decades ago. The rest was bulldozed over the objections of neighbors to make way for University of Illinois-Chicago dorms and parking lots.
Happily, the Polish is as good as ever — a smoky, slightly leathery sausage, grilled to reddish-brown glory, topped with mustard and a jungle of ivory-colored onions, also grilled, on an oversize bun. A bit greasy, I will admit, but still incomparable. They stuff the thing into a paper sack, along with a small bag of fresh, exemplary fries and a well-iced can of soda.
That's it. It's your job to find a place to consume this mini-banquet. I devoured my Polish — more accurately, perhaps, my Slavic, since the inventor was a Yugoslav immigrant, Jim Stefanovic — on a park bench on the nearby campus.
NOT all Chicago's beef goes for steaks and sausages. Some of it finds its way into sandwiches like the monsters served at Al's #1 Italian Beef, a strictly utilitarian operation in River North that consists of a grill, a counter, a drive-through and several tables.
Al's, which was started by the Ferreri and Pacelli families in 1938, bakes lean sirloin butts for four hours with water and "secret special spices" — among them garlic and mustard seed, in the view of Detective Apple. The meat is cut extra-thin on a rotary machine and piled onto a sliced baguette. If you ask for yours "sweet," they add strips of roasted green bell peppers; if you specify "hot," they ladle on an incendiary concoction of chopped chilies, olives, celery and other vegetables, called giardiniera. Either way, you are honor-bound to ask that your sandwich be dipped into the savory, garlicky pan juices.
The juices moisten the meat and soak right into the bread to make a heroic sandwich. Eating the thing is messy, extremely messy. I would not even try to improve Al's beef recipe or its gruff countermen, but I would add a stall shower if I could. (full article / free registration)
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