San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
27 kinds of hot dog? Can we be frank?
Umai Savory in SF has dozens of options. Our critic and data team ranked them all.
When I read about the expansion of Umai Savory Hot Dogs into San Francisco last month, the sheer bravado of opening a place with more than two dozen hot dogs took me aback. For one, the San Jose-born chain doesn’t just serve different permutations of the same basic ingredients — it offers a drastically varied collections of toppings that span the culinary traditions of places like Japan, Germany, Mexico and Chicago.
There were hot dogs with sprinkles of nori, braised pork brisket, fried onions and glazed pineapple, and they involved at least 10 types of sausage, with several vegetarian options in addition. Each came with a unique, audacious name like Buffalo Banger and Kyoto Fire, though not all of the mash-ups sounded appealing. The California Bae with chicken sausage, avocado, feta and sliced cucumber, for instance, seemed like a nightmarish cross between meat and a salad. I was skeptical about the place’s ability to nail it all: How many ways can you really dress up a hot dog?
I of course had to try all 27. But I couldn’t go it alone. For this session, I brought along The Chronicle’s data team, hoping to utilize their crack skills of crime data analysis and chart-making to this equally urgent endeavor. By using pure numbers, we aimed to come up with an objectively correct recommendation for the dining at the restaurant, which intends on having nine Bay Area locations by 2022.
We targeted Umai’s newest location in the basement of the Westfield mall in San Francisco. The four members of the data team and I came up with a totally scientific way to judge the hot dogs we tasted: deliciousness, messiness, creativity and repeatability, scored on a scale of 1-10. We each committed to trying at least 20 of the hot dogs, which we ordered from the stall in six-dog waves.
The data team then collated our answers, evening them out to soften positive and negative biases (i.e., adjusting for the overly positive and
negative among us), The results were conclusive: Umai Savory Hot Dogs isn’t a jack of all trades, but it is a master of some. Here’s the official ranking, and here is a look at the menu.
TOP DOGS
Topping the scales of deliciousness, creativity and repeatability was the Tokyo Signature ($8.50), a basic allbeef hot dog with Japanese-ish ingredients similar to the ones at Vancouver’s famous Japadog. Sticky caramelized onions and teriyaki sauce off-set the saltiness of the sausage; toasted and shredded nori accentuated the undercurrent of umami. In retrospect, a very important factor that went unaccounted for in the judging process was the fact that its concept felt familiar. Fans of Paris Baguette and other similar Asian bakeries will recognize the umami-enhancing function of sesame seeds or teriyaki mayonnaise on a hot dog — it just made sense.
Another winner in terms of sheer deliciousness was the Umai Truffle Dog ($13.50). Truffle flavors are layered in multiple components: a white truffle oil, minced black truffle and a truffled aioli. They add a crucial umami component that gets heightened by caramelized onions and flakes of nori. I wasn’t expecting to like this, having been burned so many times before by over-truffled dishes that come off as more rancid than earthy. But this had a nuanced taste, courtesy of mellow shiitake mushrooms that topped it.
The most repeatable of the batch was one of the more novel concepts:
By using pure numbers, we aimed to come up with an objectively correct recommendation.
the Bacon Cubano ($8.50), an adaptation of the famous sandwich. What made it good were the qualities that make Cubanos good: Dill pickle and yellow mustard added some muchneeded acidity to a salty and rich bacon-wrapped chicken dog, and nutty Swiss cheese complemented it all. That sense of balance made it a prime candidate for a second date.
LOWER-TIER PUPS
The clear loser on the deliciousness side was another Japanese-inspired take: the Shinjuku Shadow ($8.50), with an appropriately ominous name. It was a bratwurst inflicted with raw diced daikon radish, teriyaki sauce, chopped green onion and spicy Cheddar sauce. Rather than being based in reality, the dish opted to assemble disparate components according to a sort of dream logic. Daikon radish is an ingredient that does well when cooked with strong flavors or served raw with milder ones, so to have it with spicy cheese was boggling.
The least repeatable? The Baco Maco ($8.50), an andouille sausage joined with a dollop of macaroni and cheese, bacon bits, barbecue chips and an intense finisher of Cheddar sauce. It was a maelstrom of fat and salt, like a cross section of Jabba the Hutt's bicep. This was a textbook example of the fallacy of stacking a bunch of same-same ingredients on top of each other. Rather than taking the final product to new heights, the components end up in a frenetic free-for-all, muddling together like too-wet watercolors.
CONTROVERSIAL WIENERS
We also looked at how my opinion differed from the data team's. What you'll notice immediately is that we diverged quite a bit at our extremes, a fascinating exercise in casting my take against those who don't eat for a living. They rated my lowest-rated dogs, like the Honolulu Bang Bang, much higher, though one hater on the team brought their average lower overall.
In fact, data editor Dan Kopf ran a test of the correlation between my scores and the data team's and found that they were closer to mine than if you picked numbers randomly — but not by much. “If you know the data team's score, you have a 20% better chance of knowing Soleil's score than if you knew nothing at all, but 80% is unexplained,” he said.
I gave the aforementioned Hawaiithemed dish the lowest possible rating, 1 point, while the Data team gave it an average of 4.9 points. It featured a Polish sausage, bacon bits, red onions, teriyaki sauce and glazed pineapple. To me, that pineapple topping was way too sweet and tasted like a can, with none of the smoky subtlety of the pineapple that might accompany other pork dishes, like Mexican al pastor.
Data reporter Susie Neilson rated it a somewhat average 6 because she liked the pineapple, though when pressed, she admitted it was overall “not delicious.” Kopf gave it a generous 8. “I guess I just like bacon,” he said of his choice. In general, this speaks to the difference between a critic and normal people: Being willing to stand by a strong opinion is half of the job.
Another factor of doing data crunching for this ranking is that the top five on the list doesn't include my personal favorite, whose scores placed it firmly in the middle of the pack. The dark horse of the menu and a tribute to Italians everywhere, the Sicilian Classico ($8.50) is a wild-looking combination of Italian sausage, mozzarella, marinara sauce, Parmesan, oregano and black olive slices. Imagine a meatball sub, but instead of a meatball, it's a hot dog. On paper, it's kind of a headscratcher, but I was charmed by the way the tangy marinara sauce and cheese sank into the bun, imbuing it with savory flavor.
As silly as it seems to conduct an analysis of which hot dogs are the best at this one stand, I hope there's another point that this story can clarify: the idea that there is some objective truth to the idea of good food versus bad food. While a binary is reductive in principle, it's exciting to put those ideas to the test, especially with a group of people who possess very different taste preferences. If anything, it's a confirmation that a critic is a human, too, and you're definitely not going to agree with that person 100% of the time. Though I definitely want to know what you think of that Sicilian hot dog.