FORAGER ON THE LINEAGE OF JAPANESE HOT DOGS IN THE BAY AREA.
Making a hot dog at Takuya Japanese Style Hotdog and Bowl, which has locations in San Mateo and San Francisco’s Inner Sunset neighborhood, is no mere matter of applying yellow and red squiggles to the sausage, or even a heap of kraut for the probiotically lacking.
Assembling the Kimdle ($4.25), for example, starts with loading the dog up with a tangle of yakisoba noodles, then squirting on a few sauces (sweet unagi, tangy kimchi) before layering on pickled carrots, cucumber and kimchi. The cook’s final touch is to sprinkle furikake (a seasoning blend) and flakes of dried bonito over the top. The end result resembles the Flying Spaghetti Monster riding a canoe down a particularly overgrown stream.
Most of the hot dogs on Cyrus Takuya’s menu resemble the deluxe maki at his Sugoi Sushi on Valencia: some more added to more and then even more, most of the toppings Japanese in their origins and North American in their excess.
Are the Japanese hot dog’s origins truly Japanese?
“They are definitely obsessed with wieners in Japan,” says Kayoko Akabori, co-owner of Umami Mart, the Oakland barware store and food blog. She’s used to seeing them at breakfast, however, or baked into biscuits, or sold out of street stands, sparsely garnished and wrapped in paper.
When James Freeman first opened Blue Bottle Mint Plaza, his coffee shop sold a hot dog in homage to the ones Freeman had spotted in workaday Japanese cafes. There, he says, you’ll typically find a hot dog menu, as well as lists of crepes and waffles. The sausages come in all varieties. “With spaghetti, with beans, with all kinds of stuff,” he says. “People will order them for breakfast.” Blue Bottle’s, which has since been discontinued, was brushed with butter and served in an Acme roll, topped with caramelized onions alone.
Merry White, Boston University anthropology professor and author of “Coffee Life in Japan,” backs Freeman up. “Whenever a new food came to Japan, from the 1880s on, it came to cafes,” she says. “A cafe was a logical place to eat spaghetti, or pilaf, or sandwiches or pudding. All new foreign foods first came to cafes, where they became assimilated as Japanese.” Most of these hot dogs, White says, are lovingly decorated with a wavy line of mustard but little else.
A search for hot dog stands in Tokyo leads the diligent googler to an English-language newspaper article about the city’s “first” upscale sausage shop. Its name: San Francisco Peaks.
August hot dog observers all agree that there is a gap in the lineage between Tokyo cafe dogs and Takuya’s mutant wieners. It’s as wide as the Pacific Ocean.
Hawk Krall, compiler of First We Feast’s recent listicle of the best hot dogs in all 50 states, writes, “Basically every ‘Japanese style’ hot dog place I’ve seen in the last 10 years is straight-up a ripoff of JapaDog’s menu.”
The JapaDog he’s referring to is a hot dog cart in Vancouver, British Columbia, founded by Noriki and Misa Tamura in 2005. According to the Toronto Globe and Mail, the Tamuras had moved from Japan to Canada with an eye toward selling elaborate Japanese crepes on the street. At the time, Vancouver’s restrictive street-food laws permitted street vendors to sell only hot dogs. So the couple smothered sausages in teriyaki sauce, mayo and shredded seaweed — and a cult phenomenon was born.
Anthony Bourdain visited the JapaDog cart in the 2008 series of “No Reservations,” his travel TV show. And where Bourdain goeth, so followeth the copycats.
The Umami Mart team has found Japanese hot dogs in Seattle, Sacramento, Minneapolis and Los Angeles, where the Tamuras opened an official JapaDog branch. Elaborate Kobayashi dogs, named after the hot dog eating champion Takeru Kobayashi, can be spotted as far afield as Portland, Maine. Professor White recently stumbled across a string of JapaDog imitators in London, most run by young Japanese hipsters.
While an Asian fusion hot dog truck has disappeared from the UC Berkeley campus, in the Bay Area you can find Japanese hot dogs at
“They are definitely obsessed with wieners in Japan.” Kayoko Akabori, co-owner of Umami Mart in Oakland
Doggy-Style Dogs in Alameda as well as on the new lunch menu at Ichi Sushi in Bernal Heights.
Cyrus Takuya did not respond to The Chronicle’s attempts to ask him about the origins of his new hot-dog chain, let alone the visioning exercises that inspired him to smother Cajun sausages in garlicky braised beef and pineapples (the Gyufire, $6.49). Watching the cooks build a tower of toppings so high no white-flour bun could support it, one suspects Instagrammability trumped good taste. (Taste bears this theory out.)
The law of diminishing returns definitely applies to hot dog toppings. In fact, when you pass a certain point, the return on investment drops well into the red.
The genius of the Chicago dog is that Windy City carts have mastered just how much relish, chopped onions and sport peppers to balance on the curve of an all-beef wiener. Such Einstein-level gastronomy is not at work at Takuya, which has taken JapaDog’s quizzical-but-logical flavor combinations into the realms of the absurd. (If you’re worried about the calories, you can always get Takuya’s hot dogs on a salad instead of a bun.)
Assembling an Ebi Dog — tempura shrimp, spicy mayo, cherry tomatoes — is a performance. Eating one in public is another. Photographing it may be the only way to evoke the awe the Japanese hot dog was constructed to inspire.