The Japanese know it as satori. To the etymologically-giving Greeks, the word
is epiphany. But for this journeyman eater, standing there,
as I was, in Terminal 3 of Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, watching two
grown men (one being my traveling companion) throw down and go mano a mano across the steam table of a
rolling food cart, locked in what appeared to be a no-holds-barred death match to
settle that age-old debate as to whether or not ketchup belongs anywhere near a hot dog, that, that, my friends, was what we shall call my momentary of clarity. Because
at that exact moment, I understood, truly and irrevocably, that in no other American
city is the orthodoxy of canonical hotdog condiments so deeply entrenched than
in Chicago. For atop the Chicago dog,
ketchup is blasphemy. It’s
sacrilege. It’s the Miltonian fist of
culinary defiance raised against the deific sky of better judgment. Little wonder, then, that the response my
traveling companion’s puffed out, bro-chested insistence that his hotdog
receive ketchup should be one allotted for infidels and heretics of the highest
order; for his spluttering indignation and dogged pursuit of the red stuff, my
traveling companion received violence: a
quick shove to the thorax; a laudable and open-handed swipe at the jaw. Bedlam ensued. Punches were thrown. Police were called. And my traveling companion went—however
briefly—to airport jail.
To explain.
I was traveling through Chicago with Polish Paul. Co-worker.
Friend. And fellow culinarian
gifted with such protean talents and prodigious good looks that saddling him
with such a silly nickname—it was believed by my then-employer—might somehow
blunt the edge of his indefatigable Euro-swagger, his Ivan Drago-esque
I-must-break-you under bite and mien, and his industry-wide (and much-deserved)
reputation as a Lothario par excellence
with its too-cutesy-by-half alliterative charm.
We were on our way home from Missoula. A way-beyond-wealthy client had flown us to
Montana from our base of operations in Washington, D.C. to oversee a Missoula restaurant’s
attempt at catering their son’s Montana wedding (re: plated, seated dinner) for
three hundred guests under a tent, in a field, mere feet from the banks of the
Bitterroot River. Polish Paul was then
just recently arrived to America from his perennially dishwater-colored city of
Krakow, and his enthusiasm for all-things-American (including despoiling its
rural maidenry) bordered on the maniacal.
Within just forty-five minutes of touching down in Missoula (his very
first time being west of the Mississippi), Polish Paul had managed procure a
cowboy hat, the complete Sun recordings of Johnny Cash, a fifth of Jim Beam
rye, and (for the hour or so following) a toothsome, fire-haired bartender named
Becky. Polish Paul’s embrace of American
culture was that of a zealot’s belief in a newfound faith: total and all consuming. So when Polish Paul learned our return from
Montana to Washington, D.C. would be bifurcated by an hour’s layover in Chicago
O’Hare, he could hardly contain his glee.
For Polish Paul, that quixotic and self-invented Americanist he was most
certainly was, the great megalopolis of Chicago clearly signified one thing
above all else: the Great American
hotdog. Nowhere else in America were
hotdogs any more delicious than in Chicago.
Polish Paul knew this, and with
unequivocal and I’ll-fight-you-motherfucker-if-you-disagree certainty. How so?
Because a then-adolescent Paul had once come across a well-thumbed
Krakow edition of Perestroika Today, filled
with all manner of visually titillating images of uniquely American
foodstuffs. Moon Pies. Banana spilt sundaes. Cotton Candy.
Arousing as those photographs were, it was what the monthly’s editors
used as their money shot that Paul could never—and indelibly—unsee.
That’s right, friends: Miss September
1987 had been a hotdog, a Chicago dog, no less, replete with its signature iridescent
green relish and poppy seed bun. However
clumsy was that glossy, gatefold, proto Soviet full-color stab food porn, it
worked: the pimple-faced Paul popped a
veritable culinary boner, so have one the now-in-America Polish Paul absolutely
must. We pinkie-swore over successive
(if ill-advised) in-flight Bloody Mary’s that once aground in O’Hare, Paul
would realize this most American—and by his telling—almost preternatural
culinary experience. Polish Paul would
eat a Chicago dog. And I would help.
So we debarked on Concourse C of O’Hare’s Terminal 3 and engaged
the first red, yellow, and blue Vienna Beef steam cart we met. Our hot dog vendor, himself a newly arrived Polish
national and doppelganger for a circa-1980 Lech Walesa, replete with a
side-cocked solidarist’s scowl and an omnivorous walrus ‘stache hell bent on
consuming his entire face, was palpably unimpressed. For in the tipsy Polish Paul now standing
before him, the vendor recognized a fellow countryman, clearly corrupted by
first-world appetites run amok, for which Paul’s present leering desire for a
Chicago dog with ketchup was emblematic
of all that was wrong with the West. So
the vendor said “no.” He did more than
say no, actually; he crossed his arms and stepped away from the cart. Polish Paul was incredulous. He repeated his order, more loudly this time,
with less request in his voice, and more command. The vendor again shook his head. Keczup? No. He would not do it. Polish Paul glared at the vendor, choking on
his own spluttering rage. There were
threats. Insults. Indignations of labyrinthian complexity. All in Polish. But the hot dog vendor remained as serene as
a Poznanian Buddha. He could not be
moved. It was only when Polish Paul had plunged
his hand into the steaming cart water to cobble together his own Chicago dog
did the vendor change tact. He came forward,
wordlessly, and administered a withering karate chop to Paul’s throat. That blow was followed by another to Paul’s
face. Paul swung back, blindly, and the
two Poles grappled over the Vienna Beef cart like two bears trying to hug it
out. Police were called and Paul was
zip-tied into surrender and remanded to an airport holding cell, where he remained,
unsated and Chicago-dogless, until our return flight to D.C. was allowed to
leave O’Hare.
I thought little of the incident in the intervening years until
I recently moved to Chicago, splitting my time between it and my hometown of Washington,
D.C. Only then, and only after I had
encountered, and purely by chance, an incredibly delicious—nay,
transcendent—hot dog on a just-in-town run to my Chicago-area Home Depot for a
hacksaw, did I realize that in Chicago, more than in any of the other dirty
water dog capitals I’d ever eaten—New York, Boston, Philadelphia, D.C.—the Chicago
hot dog transcended its own perfunctory utility as grab-and-go street food,
while remaining fixedly central to the city’s own culinary identity as an
internationally renowned food destination.
For those of you who have yet to have the pleasure, the
Chicago dog is made a “Chicago dog” by the requisite addition of several essential
and post-maximalist savory toppings:
yellow mustard, chopped white onion, iridescent green pickle relish, a dill
pickle spear, tomato slices (or wedges), pickled “sport” peppers, and an ample
dusting of celery salt, all atop a poppy seed bun. And as for ketchup: fuck that noise. The Chicago dog does not abide the red stuff. Ever.
I went for years without ever really considering—or
eating—the dirty water dog in the many American cities in which I lived or
traveled. Its sheer ubiquity— with it
being on each street corner of every major American city I had ever visited—somehow
debased its value as regionally specific foodstuff and made it a cringe-worthy
lunch option deserving of pure culinary contempt. The hot dog represented total surrender to a hunger
which could not be outfoxed with either cunning or wit, nor felicity with one’s
own iPhone restaurant apps; the hot dog meant defeat.
But not here in Chicago.
Here, the hot dog remains the very acme of excellence in street
eating. It’s something the laboring
classes have always had over on white-collared stiffs for generations. Cab drivers.
Bookies. Waiters. Firefighters.
Cops. They’ve known for decades what
the rest of us in the American hinterlands are only now just discovering: that the Chicago dog reins supreme.
I come late to this party.
Way late. I didn’t purposefully, deliberately
eat my first Chicago dog until the autumn of 2017. Sure, I had spent most of the 90s in Chicago,
and in that decade, unwittingly consumed hundreds of the things. In those days, for this then-college student,
eating wasn’t deliberate or even political; my gastronomic decision-making was
rooted, purely, in economy and survival.
But upon moving to Chicago in summer 2017 as a food industry
professional with seventeen hard years in, everything about what I then—as
now—chose to eat was now invariably fraught with judgment and implied decree. And after eating my first Chicago dog since
the riotous Polish Paul incident at O’Hare, I knew it was true love, and I eat
them every chance I get.
Founded in 1893 by Austrian immigrants Emil Reichel and Sam
Ladany, and made locally famous at the Columbian Exposition of that same year,
Vienna Beef has long been heralded as the gold standard in Chicago street
eating. And while the Windy City hosts
other several other venerable hot dog manufacturers—the Eisenberg and Red Hot brands
come to mind—the sheer near-omnipresence of the Vienna Beef dog suggests that
it holds a special place in the hearts (and major arteries) of Windy City eaters. And with so much of Chicago’s culinary
identity encased in its eponymous
dog, I decided that for my first hotdog as a newly returned and re-minted
prodigal son of Chicago, I would go directly to the source. The fountainhead. The mothership. I went to the Vienna Beef Factory Café and
got myself a hotdog.
If there exists in this world of gastronomy a more pure and proto-Marxian
archetype of a happy-worker’s paradise wherein the sleeves-up proletariat
consumes, bodily, that which it has just produced, I’ve yet to encounter its
kind anywhere in America. Located in the
street-level underbelly of the Vienna Beef Factory, with the wheels of
meat-in-tube-form industry humming ceaselessly overhead, the factory cafe itself
occupies a liminal (if deeply egalitarian) mixed-use, culinary-and-retail space
where Vienna Beef factory workers lunch elbow-to-elbow with eaters from the
outside world in a florescent-lit, red-yellow-blue confluence of nagahyde-and-formica
break-room-based insouciance and ennui so deep and vexed that the hum of
refrigerated cases of just-made meats and cheeses is all you hear. But so what if conversation is not on the
menu? It’s not for the witty banter and
persiflage that eaters hunger and come.
It’s for the hotdogs, boy-o, and the Vienna Beef Factory has them
a’plenty.
I ordered the classic.
I ordered the Chicago Style Hot Dog.
What I received was nothing short of sublime: a fresh-from-the factory
Vienna Beef dog “fully dressed” on a just-steamed poppy seed, served with a
side of impeccable, perfectly salted, just-dunked fries. Crinkle cut no less. And as I chewed, blissed out, as I was, on
what surely must be among the crowning achievements of proletarian gastronomic
glory that filled my mouth with a blunt-force-trauma umami-bomb of
flavors—salty, sour, and sport-pepper hot—I realized the genius of the Vienna
Beef Factory Café lies not what it is—a hushed culinary haven for a work
force seeking a moment’s reprieve from their noble toil above—but for what it’s
not.
For nowhere among my fellow eaters—middle aged men, mostly—was there a
whiff of irony, nor any miasma of hipness. Nowhere among them were sardonic hipster
beards or the too-cool-for-school strains of Father John Misty issuing from the
speakers overhead. Nowhere among them
was any palpable longing for culinary “betterment” from, say, the andouilles
and boudins of the world. No way. Not here.
The Vienna Beef Factory Café is a sarcasm-free, no bullshit zone
offering the quotidian best of what surely must be one of life’s keenest
culinary pleasures: a perfect American
hot dog.
It really is that good.
I haven’t spoken to Polish Paul in a while—years, maybe—but when
I do, I’ll be sure to invite him back to Chicago. And when he makes the trip—as I know he
will—I’ll be take him to the gloriously inglorious Vienna Beef Factory Café,
where we will sit in the wan florescent light, among our fellow food industry brethren,
and laugh about the bad old days over a meal of Vienna Beef hot dogs.
Without ketchup,
of course.
Your link: Vienna Beef
