I am an American and I Eat Hot Dogs

1 x Hot Dog with everything

Everything gets steamed at Steamers. One side effect of the steaming process is the weakened structural integrity of the bun. During my meal, this weakening of the bun resulted in catastrophic bun failure. It was not a pretty sight. I like things sloppy, but not this sloppy. Not pick-the-dog-up-with-your-hands-and-continually-try-and-stuff-it-back-in-the-bun sloppy. We’ll be skipping over Steamers the next time we’re in the area.

Also note the giant styrofoam cups in the background. Steamers hates the environment too!

1 x Charred Dog with everything

We’re on tour and we’re in the middle of a doubleheader of shows. One in a library on the south side of Chicago and then we head up to Evanston on the north for a show at Northwestern. Just a few miles from the school,, we start our search. It’s dinner time and who knows if we’ll have a chance to eat once we hit the school. Odds are against it. So we watch like hawks for one of Chicago’s famous sons: the hot dog stand.

Poochies springs up on the left. It looks promising. Inside, the walls are lined with published testimonials to their greatness. This is the kind of thing you don’t see at a place like Demon Dogs.

I ordered up a charred dog with everything. It came with the full set: celery salt include. I hate it when the slingers get lazy and leave out the celery salt. But at Poochies, all the details were attended to. Good job guys. Unfortunately, the dog itself wasn’t the most memorable. It was a fine Chicago dog, don’t get me wrong, but there’s fierce competition in this city and this one didn’t do too much to distinguish itself. This is the kind of place that you can stop for a quality dog, but I wouldn’t really drive too far out of my way to get here. Maybe 5-10 miles depending on how much I wanted a dog.

1 x Chili Dog

OK, next time we’ll learn from our mistakes. Hopefully…. I’ll try and remember to reread my blog entries before making return visits to places of questionable dog quality. Really, the only reason we stopped here was because I wanted one of those Frosted Orange drinks (which are delicious). But once inside, I couldn’t resist the allure of the chili dog. The chili was even worse than I remembered. Just really bland and ground beefy. Offensively bland. Like Kenny G.

1 x Polish Sausage with the Comeback Sauce

I still don’t know if I can qualify this as a hot dog because he claims it’s a sausage, but it’s just as good as almost any hot dog I’ve ever had. Plus, it doesn’t really have too much of that sausage flavor you’d expect from buying a sausage from a guy with a cart.

The fixin’s are what make J.B. really special. A very sweet sautee of onions and then his legendary Comeback Sauce. The whole thing hits that salty-sweet spot really nicely. It was an inspiring meal. It made me want to start working on my own special sauce.

2 x tiny corn dogs

I’m not really all that into corn dogs, but one of the Monsterface guys ordered a plate of these, so I popped a few in. They were actually pretty tasty. A nice, sweet batter that coated the tiny dogs very well. Good ratio of batter to dog. No dipping sauces needed.

1.5 x Chili Half-Smokes

Yes, we make yet another trip to chili dog heaven. This time I ordered two of the half-smokes, but couldn’t handle them all. Next time I won’t fill up on cheese before the dogs show up. The cheese fries are good, but the dogs are better.