A Hardy Farewell to Hot Doug's, Chicago's Sausage Superstore

Hot Doug’s didn’t open until 10:30 AM, but the line was cut off at about 6:45 last Friday, the restaurant’s final day. The group at the front had gotten there early the day before, and there were already more than 50 customers lined up when my friend Matt and I arrived at about 1 am, ready and more than willing to endure 12+ hours in the cold rain. It’s silly enough when people do that sort of thing for an iPhone or a pair of Nikes, but at least those things last. Why the fuck would any of us wait that long for some hot dogs?

***

Doug Sohn was in his late thirties when he opened his restaurant in 2001. Though he had an Ivy League education, he never really had ambition for the status-y career that often follows. He had various temp jobs, and eventually went to culinary school. Working as a cookbook editor, he made it a hobby to go to various Chicago hot dog stands and jot down notes — more for personal records than anything else — about whether or not they were any good.

Despite the city’s reputation for having great hot dogs, most of the establishments are just mediocre, and Doug thought he could do better. He only needed about $30,000 in initial start-up capital, and many people thought the place wasn’t going to last. Family members wondered why he wasn’t selling hamburgers, Italian beef, or pizza puffs like every other Chicago hot dog stand, and Doug heard through the grapevine that a Vienna Beef employee didn’t think his shop would last more than a few months.

Nevertheless, Doug was steadfast in his vision, and didn’t really care much about appealing to everybody so much as appealing greatly to a select few. “I don’t need to capture the population of Chicago,” he told me in 2011. “I need to capture .001 percent. My feeling was, ‘I really want to go to the place. I can’t be the only person who has these tastes.”

Ultimately, Hot Doug’s would do much more than fulfill a niche.

***

I have sophisticated tastes in unsophisticated foods. I don’t much care for fine dining, but I’ll go to the edge of the Earth and back for the best burgers, pizzas, and sausages. As such, Hot Doug’s appealed to me from the moment I set foot in it about five years ago, and I’ve been going there regularly ever since. It was never a question that I would eat there on its final day, no matter the inconvenience.

In fact, inconvenience has always been part of the draw of Hot Doug’s. It’s not really near any major public transportation, or anything else, so you’re not just hopping in there for a bite to eat in between shopping or running errands. There was almost always a line of about 60-90 minutes — which ballooned this past summer after Doug announced that he’d be closing — and going there was experiential. And hunger is the best spice.

You weren’t just eating a meal, you were doing something, and the idea of that engendered a sense of community such that everybody felt like they were in it together. You’d often meet new and interesting people, and end up pulling tables together after you ordered so you could sit with your new friends. In a sense, waiting for Hot Doug’s was like the line ride in South Park, except the waiting was fun, and there was a payoff at the end. I guess, then, that’s a bad metaphor, and it wasn’t really like the line ride at all.

***

Every day the restaurant was open, Doug was at the counter taking orders. This is not to say he never took vacations. He took a lot of vacations. Probably 6-8 weeks a year when you added it all up. Some of them were around normal times like Christmas or July 4th, but there’d be other times where his Twitter account would announce that there’d be a week down the road where the shop would be closed, more or less because Doug felt like it:

That happened all the time, and you’d have to double-check the web site before going, lest you get all the way out there only to have your sweet sausage dream turn into a nightmare. (When that happened, you’d go to Kuma’s Corner, which is about as good of a burger as exists, and you’d still traditionally have a wait, but there you’d be serenaded with death metal. That place requires more of a certain mood.)

Doug turned down multi-million dollar expansion offers along the way. What would be the point? He had everything he wanted right there. “The goal is to create this place,” he told me. “I don’t want a big house in the suburbs. Or nice suits. Or fancy cars… There is nothing I feel like I’m really missing. It’s like, ‘OK, so I can buy more stuff.’ You know what? I have a nice TV, I have cookware, I have good knives. Those are the things I really need. I want to go home at the end of the day and use those things. Restaurants can be all-consuming.”

He didn’t want to sacrifice the food quality or the experience. “Then, it’s not going to be Hot Doug’s,” he said. “It’s going to be 10 cookie-cutter locations. Everything would be much more computerized because it would have to be. Then, it’s different.”

***

This is the group I was in line with on Friday morning. From left to right: Rick is a cook at a dive bar and for Dinner Lab, a chef-driven pop-up dinner company. He just got a Hot Doug’s tattoo, which means he eats for free. Sei Jin is a corporate lawyer, and had hundreds of really promising food and drink recommendations.

Mike and Willy design video games; Mike made Solipskier, which you can play on your computer or phone. Willy is in the process of developing a first-person adventure game with MC Escher-like relativity illusions. It sounds super cool, but I cannot adequately explain it more deeply than that. My friend Matt works in hospital technology consulting, and then there’s me. In that photo, I’m wearing Matt’s Wisconsin sweatshirt. It makes me look fat. I’m definitely not saying that I’m not fat, but I’m not nearly as fat as that sweatshirt makes me look.

As I mentioned before, we all got there right around 1 am, and there were 50-60 people in front of us. That number would balloon to about 100 before opening, which infuriated me on several levels. How could you get there, wait hours in the cold rain, and then let people cut in front of you? And why were people so dickishly brazen about it? You had to earn this.

It rained all night, which was discouraging, but probably saved us hours of our life. Way more people would’ve been camped out if it weren’t so shitty outside. There was maybe a 15 minute reprieve of the rain, and I dozed off with my head in my right hand and my umbrella in my left. I soon awoke, DRENCHED. It was pouring and my umbrella was not coming close to doing its job. I’d be soaked until I got home around 3pm.

At oh–I don’t know, 4 am?–people from the group of biggest offenders (obnoxious twenty-somethings who were drinking aggressively all night, and letting a million dozen friends cut) got in their car and left to go buy coffee or something. Another guy in his crew stood in his parking spot to hold it. This sounds like a boring story, but it got interesting a few minutes later when someone else tried to park there. A game of chicken ensued, and the would-be spot nabber kept inching backwards as if to threaten to run the guy over.

The spot holder held his ground, and the car’s bumper was basically at his feet, but the front was sticking out blocking both ways of traffic. Some guy tried to get by and started LAYING on the horn, swearing not just at the parking stand-off but everybody in line. “You’re doing all this for a fucking hot dog? Get a fucking life.”

***

We haven’t even really talked about the actual food yet, other than to say it’s really good, which should be obvious by the virtue of our waiting that long for it. Hot Doug’s had two separate menus — regulars and specials. The normal stuff, which was always available, consisted of hot dogs and various sausages, which were really good, but not necessarily irreplicable.

The specials, though, damn. Various combinations would rotate and be available for about two weeks, after which you might never see them again. Or they might make a triumphant comeback, and if there was one that had previously stuck out, you’d have to make it a point to get out there before they went into another hibernation. This is what Doug was serving on the last day:

– Salsa Verde Wild Boar Sausage with Chipotle Dijonnaise, Jalapeño Bacon and Smoked Gouda Cheese
– Escargot and Guanciale Sausage with Parsley-Garlic Butter and Camembert Cheese
– Hungarian-Style Smoked Pork Sausage with Smoked Paprika Mustard and Cheese-Stuffed Hot Peppers
– Swiss Cheese-Stuffed Corned Beef Sausage with Russian Dressing, Sweet Swiss Cheese and Sauerkraut
– Smoked Crayfish and Pork Sausage with Creole Mustard, Hominy Grits and Goat Cheese
– Nacho Cheese Pork Sausage with Jalapeño Mayonnaise, Pico de Gallo and Chihuahua Cheese
– Jack Daniels and Fennel Smoked Pork Sausage with Roasted Pepper Dijonnaise, Irish Whiskey Cheese and Crispy Fried Onions
– Kale, Walnut and Raisin Pork Sausage with Curry Mayonnaise and Ricciola Cheese
– Portuguese Linguiça with Saffron Rouille and Young Iberico Cheese
– Foie Gras and Sauternes Duck Sausage with Truffle Aioli, Foie Gras Mousse and Fleur de Sel
– Bacon Cheeseburger Sausage with Coca-Cola BBQ Sauce, Maple-Smoked Cheddar Cheese and Smoked Onion Marmalade
– Merguez Lamb Sausage with Spicy Harissa and Feta Cheese

Hot Doug’s has inspired various joints with similar menus across the city, and some of them are almost as good if you just boil it down to the food, but none of them come close to matching the experience.

A few hours before open, some of Doug’s friends and staff brought us coffee and doughnuts that he had bought for us while we waited, which was a gesture that was appreciated by everybody. Business time was at 10:30, and as the line condensed we thought we’d be eating in about 90-120 minutes.

We thought wrong.

As it turned out, the same people ahead of us who were cool with letting a bunch of people cut were also all ordering dozens of sausages for takeout, which they were either bringing to friends and co-workers, or, more sinisterly, selling them on the black market. (I can’t even begin to guess how much they would’ve sold for if folks put any real effort into it.)

Matt and I had been planning on working that afternoon, but that wasn’t gonna happen. I kept sending Lisk status updates that criminally underestimated how much longer I’d be waiting, and didn’t end up making it back until Bad NFL News Dump Time, which ended up passing without incident.

When we finally got to the counter at about 2:30, I voiced my dismay with my line-mates to Doug (which I regret in hindsight), who characteristically made fun of my plight — “You should write a bad Yelp review” — with a smile, before graciously comping my meal (in spite of my whining, not because of it).

Matt and I ended up splitting the above — we got two of the bacon cheeseburger sausages, the Jack Daniels and fennel-smoked pork sausage, the wild boar, a brat, a thuringer, and duck fat fries. To answer your question: Yes, I was doing that to my arteries, but drew the line at washing it down with diet soda. There’s no real way to describe how fantastic that all was — especially the first, oh, two sausages — but it’s not a feeling that’s going to be surpassed anytime soon.

As for Doug, he told me a few months ago that he doesn’t know what his next line of work will be. He’s apparently renting an RV and heading to Bourbon Country and the Carolinas for a couple weeks, and after that he’ll probably take a few more months off before figuring something out. His logic is that he created all this with the force of his personality and individuality, and that he’ll succeed in whatever he chooses to throw himself into next. I wouldn’t bet against him.

[Photos via Hot Doug’s, WGN, and Me]