| Tuesday, December 11, 2007 |
21:06 - Discomfort food
|
(top) |
Having heard that it was all kinds of good, I headed over to the mall after work to catch No Country for Old Men. However, not having been so savvy as to bother checking the schedules beforehand, I found myself there at the food court a full two hours before showtime. Ah well, I thought to myself. No sense in wasting a trip to the food court. I like food courts. Call it a guilty pleasure.
So call it a further guilty pleasure that when I saw that a new restaurant had installed itself at the end of the gaudy neon-lit semicircle surrounding the entrance foyer and Century ticket counter at Oakridge, I was drawn immediately and inexorably away from the Great Steak & Potato Co. and the Rubio's and the Subway to the plain, red, internally lit sign on an austere metal background that said, simply, dawgs.
I likes me a good hot dog.
"Would you like to try a Chicago Dog?" came the voice from somewhere in front of me, sandwiched between a Sbarro and an insane-looking thing called Beard Papa's, where three Asian chefs in tall cylindrical chef's hats peered around with confused expressions at the complete lack of people lining up for their counter.
I looked back and forth. There in front of me, under the austere metal sign and behind an almost equally austere metal counter with nothing in it but a few tiny trays of condiments and another bin of soft drinks, a lady beamed at me hopefully, proferring a tray of little Vienna sausage chunks on toothpicks.
I likes me a good Chicago dog.
"I might," I said, and chewed thoughtfully as I perused the menu.
 
Mall though this might be, that's all the menu was: a printed-out sheet taped to the inside of the sneeze guard. But look at those items, why don't you. New York-style Sabrett kosher. Garlic. Wisconsin Johnsonville brats. Bockwurst. Greek Loukaniko. A lemon chicken dog "for the true hot dog snob". And, of course, a Chicago dog—saying all the right things, from the pickle spear to the celery salt to the "neon green relish".
And what the hell—the menu, while it could use some proofreading, has a sense of self-deprecating humor. That's always a plus.
I briefly considered an item that was being shown on the two giant flat-screen monitors attached to the back wall, which were rotating through an echo of the menu (black text on white—about the lamest use of giant flat-screen monitors I've ever seen) and some various specials: a KOBE BEEF DAWG, which was normally $10, but for now was $6.50: "The King of the Hot Dogs". But no... ever since Wienerschnitzel stopped selling their (quite faithful rendition of the) Chicago Dog, I've had no easy access to one. So that's what I asked for.
Unfortunately, that's where things started to go all wonky.
First of all, the hot dog took the guy and the lady (the only staff there at 8:20 on a Tuesday night during Christmas shopping season) some five or six minutes to put together. The shop had clearly only been open for a couple of days at most, because she had to show him the process for making the hot dog, which ingredients to put on it, and so on; this after asking me whether perhaps I wanted to put the dog together myself, which I thought an odd option to say the least. ("You're the experts," I told them with an encouraging smile; the expressions I got back seemed more scared than gratified.)
Secondly, the dog didn't end up bearing that much resemblance to a classic Chicago dog as I understood it. First off, it had a slathering of cheese sauce on it, which I don't remember being anywhere in the classic definition or mentioned in the menu. And that's just the beginning. No celery salt. The tomatoes seemed stewed rather than diced or in wedges. The "neon green" relish was, as best I could tell, just your typical sweet relish out of a big foodservice jar—not the tart dill relish one might hopefully seek in circumstances such as, say, a dedicated hot dog restaurant. And the pickle spear.... the pickle spear... was no such thing, but several pale crinkle-cut chips, the kind with hardly any flavor to speak of. The one bright spot—aside from the chewy Vienna Beef sausage, which was quite nice, and the roll, which had some heft to it, though poppyseeds were not in evidence—was the little hot sport pepper. Too bad there was only one of them. Even Wienerschnitzel gives you three.
Oh yes: and they served it with a fortune cookie.
... Why, thank you, crazy hot dog store!
I cannot find hide nor hair of this restaurant on Google; apparently it's some local thing, judging by the "Made in California by local sausage makers" proudly flaunted by the menu. I have no idea how they managed to secure a spot in this high-traffic Silicon Valley mall, when every other concessioner there is a major chain complete with giant royalty-free pictures of people enjoying food and life grinning down on you from behind the garish logos. And I have no idea how much longer they'll be there, since I was the only person who came near their counter in the twenty minutes I was there.
But I've got to go back sometime, just to see if things change. And to try the KOBE BEEF DAWG. Just to see what the hell.
|
|
Brian Tiemann
