Haute dogs in Chicago

Article by: Karla Zimmerman, September 2008

The line snakes out the door. You wait, stomach growling, mind reeling with important decisions. Will it be the blue cheese pork with pear crème fraiche and smoked almonds, or the sesame-ginger duck? Chef Doug Sohn advises on your selection, and recommends you pair it with...french fries.

That's right: you're eating at a hot dog stand. Granted, it's Hot Doug's, the hot dog stand for foodies; the hot dog stand that TV chefs Anthony Bourdain and Mario Batali have dined at. Hot Doug's sums up Chicago's exploding culinary scene in a bite: haute cuisine running headlong into earthy tastes for a flavour-packed blast.

Sohn was born and raised in Chicago and attended culinary school at local Kendall College. He worked in restaurants for a few years, then as a cookbook editor. He opened Hot Doug's in 2001, after realising the city's tubed-meat specialty wasn't getting the respect it deserved.

Sohn discusses gourmet the Chicago way

Q: You serve a rotating menu of stylish dogs. Wild rice chicken sausage with sweet curry mustard and goat cheese. Goji berry pheasant sausage with warm cherry relish and butterkäse cheese. What inspires your creations?

A: Dining out. Reading food magazines. Travelling. For instance, I was in the Alsace region of France and had tart flambé. We do a bacon sausage already, so we added crème fraiche, caramelised onions and Muenster cheese to make our version.

Q: What's your top seller?

A: The Chicago-style hot dog. It's what I recommend to first-time visitors. It's really satisfying. It's not daunting or complex, but has lots of flavours and textures. (Sohn isn't kidding. The Chicago-style hot dog entails an all-beef wiener cushioned by a warm poppy-seed bun. Condiments include raw tomato slices, chopped onions, sweet-and-salty fluorescent-green relish, hot peppers, a dab of mustard, a dusting of celery salt and a crisp pickle spear crowning the heap.)

Q: What are your favourite restaurants?

A: I try to visit smaller, independent restaurants. In the last 10 years there's been an unbelievable explosion of places. I love Smoque for barbeque, Devon Avenue for its Indian restaurants, and Avec and Blackbird, chef Paul Kahan's restaurants, for a nice meal.

Q: Hot Doug's is one of the only restaurants ever to have its own power-pop theme song. You must be a music fan. Where do you recommend one go to hear live music in Chicago?

A: I've seen some of the best shows of my life at the Metro. The Abbey Pub and Martyr's are both great rooms.

Q: Have you sworn allegiance to any of Chicago's sports teams?

The Cubs. I grew up on the city's north side, so I have no choice. They offer a lot of life lessons. Like 'looking good on paper and performing well are two totally different things'. The hot dogs at Wrigley Field, though, are one of the city's great shames. I bring my own, wrapped in foil in a soft-sided bag.

Foodies' A-team

Chicago has lower start-up costs than food cities like New York or San Francisco, which means talented young chefs have been flocking to the city to stir the pot and reap an extravagant number of Mobil stars and James Beard awards alongside the town's old masters. Top chefs include:

• Grant Achatz of Alinea: The man behind 'molecular gastronomy' serves between 12 and 20 courses of space-age cuisine. Dishes may emanate from a centrifuge or be pressed into a capsule.
• Charlie Trotter of Charlie Trotter's: The surly king of Chicago cooking is a nouvelle master who has never served the same menu twice.
• Rick Bayless of Frontera Grill: You may have seen him on TV, stirring up pepper sauces and other jump-off-the-tongue Mexican creations.
• Homaro Cantu of Moto: Critics describe his post-modern cuisine as Salvador Dalí meets Willy Wonka. Levitating food, edible menus and laser-cooked dishes are just the beginning.

Beyond the hot dog

Together with the hot dog, deep-dish pizza and the Italian beef sandwich form Chicago's holy trinity of culinary specialties.

In 1943, the chef at Uno's rolled out a mighty pizza dough, constructing the first famous Chicago-style pizza - the ones that rise several inches from the bottom of the plate and cradle a molten pile of toppings. You can eat at the wellspring, though debate rages as to whether upstarts such as Giordano's, ladled with perfectly tangy tomato sauce, or Gino's East, oozing cheese over a crisp cornmeal crust, might now take the prize.

The Italian beef sandwich is an only-in-Chicago concoction and stacks up like this: thin-sliced, slow-cooked roast beef that's sopped in natural gravy and spicy giardiniera (pickled peppers), then heaped onto a big fat white bread-roll. It's a dribbly mess, but worth wiping up after at Al's #1.