Chicago dogs: A recipe universal for nostalgia
Thompson: Memories of the Windy City relished on a poppy seed bun.
Jay Michael’s mother went to an all-girls Catholic school while growing up in Chicago. That meant no meat on Fridays, especially during Lent. Jay’s grandmother, however, worked the second shift at her job, so she’d clock out at midnight.
“My grandfather would pick her up and they’d swing by the stand after work so they could eat Chicago dogs,” Michael remembers. “By then, it would be 12:15 a.m. on Saturday.”
Michael’s dad was in the military. Jay was born overseas. But Chicago is as much in his blood as the cholesterol from the Vienna Beef he’s been consuming more often than usual now that Chicago Dog & Co has opened about a mile from the Altamonte Springs home he shares with partner Carolyn Dickinson.
They connected 12-plus years ago on the dating site PlentyofFish.com, “with the prerequisite of him being a Bears and a Cubs fan!” she says, laughing. Dickinson was born and raised in Chicago — “11 blocks from Wrigley Field,” she tells me — and when the pair merged households, each came with their own copy of “The Blues Brothers.”
So, yeah, that’s pretty Chicago.
“Relocating to sunny Florida has its advantages when it comes to weather, but disadvantages when it comes to food,” says Dickinson, transplanted since the early ‘90s.
“Every time we go home … the first thing we eat when we land is a Chicago dog and the last thing we eat before we leave is a Chicago dog.”
Unlike many Chicagoans, however, Dickinson’s palate isn’t centered on hallowed favorites.
“You can get a good one
at pretty much any hot dog stand in the city,” she says. “The obsession with Portillo’s and other places doesn’t make much sense to a real Chicagoan because we can get good hot dogs anywhere, and they’re pretty much all the same.”
Within the city, there are acceptable variations, equally authentic but hyperlocal.
The original, iconic version is like the Highlander. There can be only one.
I experienced my first Chicago dog at precisely the place where most Orlandoans — in particular, its Windy City transplants — would have sent me for something so momentous: Hot Dog Heaven.
If you’re unfamiliar with this iconic street food, it’s a beauty born for Instagram a century before its time, with roots German and Jewish, Italian and Greek, just one fine example of the melting pot that has made Chicago into the food-rich city it has become.
At its core: a Vienna beef hot dog in a natural casing — the six-inch, 9:1 size for serious sticklers. Chicago dog purveyors wave the Vienna flag like a blazing, red-and-yellow beacon of authenticity via all manner of signage, umbrellas being the most festive, perhaps, and visible from the road.
The snappy tube steak is swathed in a poppy seed bun, bathed in both yellow mustard and visually arresting neon relish, dragged through a gorgeous garden of white onion, tomato and the dueling greens of kosher pickle and vinegary sport pepper, then dashed with celery salt.
It was my first. And we post all our firsts in 2021. And it was greeted with a sound wave of validation from fans around the metro. Except for one guy.
“The tomato wedges are not thick enough,” he wrote. “Those are slices.”
“I saw that post!” Holly Cowden told me a couple of days later, amused but diplomatic. “Maybe he’s from Chicago,” she reasoned. “The city has different sides, and each area does things a little different. Some do the pickle quartered and you get a giant chunk on your hot dog. Some people use cucumber. Some do giant tomato wedges… And for some people, like this guy, that’s the only way it should be.”
If Orlando had a Hot Dog Princess, Cowden would wear the tiara and sash.
Her parents, Beth and Mike Feld, opened Hot Dog Heaven in 1987. They retired just before the pandemic. She and her husband, Jarett, now helm its counters with a faithful crew, serving even more faithful customers.
At the start of the pandemic, Hot Dog Heaven shut down for a month, during which they strategized, configuring a system to serve customers safely. Once reopened, Cowden marveled. They were doing more business than they’d been doing inside before they closed.
“Maybe it was about comfort,” she theorizes. “Maybe because for some of them, they couldn’t go home to Chicago. They couldn’t see their families. But they’d come by the vanload and order the most food I’d ever seen in a single order. Ten-page tickets for Chicago dogs.”
It’s emotional, she says. “As a family business, you have so many customers. You see divorces, illnesses, kids born, growing, moving away. And then you see three generations of family come in for a hot dog. Or ordering our food to bring to someone who’s in the hospital. It means so much.”
Cowden grew up here but was carted home to her parents’ hometown with frequency. Feld was a tow truck driver when he first arrived in Florida, she says, but before long grew tired of missing his favorite Chicago bite. But owning his own hot dog stand here didn’t preclude him from tasting around the town on each trip home.
“He had a couple he liked, but mostly he enjoyed taking us to different stands so we could try them all and taste the differences.”
Cowden’s favorite was at the Bunny Hutch, a small hot dog stand attached to some batting cages in Lincolnwood. It’s still there, in fact.
“They had the best chili, housemade — like a stew almost,” she remembers. “I was having fun. I loved the neighborhood. It wasn’t about the hot dog. It was about the experience.”
“It’s an event,” says Sandra Rivera, co-owner of Chicago Dog & Co. She’s lived in Central Florida since she was 7, after her parents moved her and her sister Monica from the Windy City.
“You can recreate most things you can find in a restaurant, but it’s the experience that makes it memorable. You went to your favorite stand with your grandparents, you got hot dogs after church on Sundays, or maybe you formed a kinship with the employees there. It’s just a hot dog, but all these experiences and connections with the food you eat stir up memories and good, warm feelings. And that holds true for Chicago street food.”
And in part, what drove the sisters to open their new Altamonte Springs outpost last month.
Housed in what for decades was the Little Dairy Manor ice cream shop on FL-436, the building’s walk-up design mirrors the common experience back home, where most Chicago dogs are eaten outside, standing in the street or at a table beneath one of those colorful Vienna umbrellas.
“People come and tell us they used to come here to get ice cream with their parents,” says Rivera. “They were sad to see it go, but happy to see someone come in — another family-owned business — and spruce up the place.”
Rivera grew up eating Hot Dog Heaven when the cravings hit, “but there was definitely a void in this neighborhood.”
It’s an overall void, despite staples like Hot Dog Heaven, Chubby’s in Maitland or Willy’s Wieners in Kissimmee, where dog devotees flock. The delayed Portillo’s opening (at press time, it had just been re-announced for June 15) has tugged many a Chicagoan’s heartstrings with anticipation, much in the same way that Orlando’s new White Castle has. Interestingly, the two chains are steps from one another.
Michael and Dickinson, for whom seeing a Cubs game at every major stadium in the U.S. is a couple goal, are unmoved. “It’s not worth an eighthour wait. It’s a chain,” says Michael.
They’re fans of the mom-and-pop. Die-hards who pack a Vienna hot dog kit for every game so they can tailgate.
“We’ve had people offer us $50 cash for a hot dog in the parking lot!” he marvels. But not really.
“That Chicago dog takes you back through your own history,” says Dickinson. “Your parents take you to your first Cubs game when you’re a kid, and you eat your first real Chicago dog and then 40 years later, displaced in Orlando, you can go right back to that moment.”
“It’s meaningful,” says Michael of those parking-lot moments and the hometown camaraderie. “There’s a feeling, an attitude.” He recounts the fun story of his grandparents’
Lenten workaround. “It’s our story. Not just my family’s, but ours as Chicagoans.”
He laughs.
“I mean, nobody else is putting tomatoes on their hot dogs. And we’re proud of that.”