There's a New Dog in Town
The Making of the Simonson Dog.
In February, I took a seat at the bar at PDT. I was there to try the new hot dog created by Bill Durney, the owner of Hometown Bar-B-Que and Red Hook Tavern. I was working on a story about fancy bar hot dogs and the Durney dog looked like a likely candidate for coverage.
PDT owner Jeff Bell soon posted up at the barstool beside me. He had a proposition.
PDT has a long tradition of collaborating with local, notable chefs on custom hot dogs. Why hot dogs? Because PDT was originally the brainchild of Brian Shebairo, the owner of Crif Dogs, a hot dog joint on St. Mark’s Place in the East Village. In 2007, he opened a speakeasy-style cocktail bar next door. The two businesses were connected via a secret entrance disguised as a telephone booth.
The bar quickly flourished. When it came to food, it only made sense that Crif Dogs would provide sustenance in the form of fancy hot dogs, as well as tater tots. High meshed with low in the nicest possible manner.
But the low wasn’t too low. Because PDT quickly became an after-hours haunt for the celebrity chefs who plied their trade around the neighborhood. Chefs like Wylie DuFresne (WD-50) and David Chang (Momofuku) became regulars. Soon enough, they were contributing specialized hot dog recipes to the menu. The Chang Dog (2007) was a deep-fried hot dog wrapped in bacon and smothered with Chang’s own Momofuku Ssäm Bar red kimchee purée. The Wylie Dog (2008) was a deep-fried wiener nestled in deep-fried mayo, hot-dog-bun crumbs, tomato molasses, freeze-dried onions, and shredded romaine.
The tradition continues to this day. As I said, I was at PDT in February to check out the Durney Dog, which had a base of pastrami. Bell’s proposition was this: would I consider creating a custom hot dog for Crif Dogs/PDT? The idea was from Bell’s wife, who noticed that I had a thing for hot dogs and hot dog history. (This is true.) I, of course, agreed, even though I had never come up with an original food recipe for anything in my life. (Cocktails, yes.)
The first inkling of what I might create came from Bell. He mentioned that, in the past, Crif Dogs has sold a couple different hot dogs made with Taylor ham, the salty, vinegary processed pork that is specific to New Jersey. (The meat goes by two names: pork roll in South Jersey, Taylor ham in North Jersey). This resonated for two reasons. One, Mary Kate is from Jersey. Through her, I had come to love and appreciate pork roll as an alternative breakfast meat. Two, we had recently returned from Baltimore, where hot dogs are wrapped in fried slices of bologna.
What if, instead of bologna, a hot dog was bear-hugged by slices of pork roll?
I went home with that initial idea. Because of the Jersey aspect, I concluded the resultant hot dog would be garnished with mustard, chopped onion and some sort of meat sauce—the triumvirate of condiments that you find at the Garden State’s many “Texas Weiner” stands. (That said, several of Jersey’s most famous hot dog stands do not do the mustard-onion-meat sauce thing, including Rutt’s Hut, Hiram’s Roadstand and Hot Dog Johnny’s.)
In the beginning, I had grand visions of bringing in a special frankfurter (perhaps from my home state of Wisconsin, like Usinger’s) for my custom dog. But when I learned that Crif Dog’s house dog was Thumann’s, I stopped dreaming. I love Thumann’s. Their pork-beef links are superlative, one of a kind. Thumann’s is used as such iconic Jersey hot dog stands at Hiram’s Roadstand and Rutt’s Hut. I could happily live with Thumann’s for my hot dog.
As for the mustard, well, I love mustard, and I have tried dozens of brands. My fridge is typically filled with at least a dozen different mustards. I fantasized of bringing in a regional mustard that PDT patrons had never heard of. But, when it came down to experimenting with various hot dog recipes, nothing quite did the job like good old dependable Gulden’s spicy brown. New Yorker Charles Gulden began his mustard business on Elizabeth Street in 1862. He is buried in Green-wood Cemetery.
That left the meat sauce. As with so many American hot dog recipes over the years, it all came down to the meat sauce. Go to most any old hot dog stand in the eastern half of the United States and they’ll tell you where they buy their buns, their dogs, what mustard they use—(onions are onions; no secret there). But the meat sauce will be a secret. It’s proprietary. It is upon the meat sauce that they rest their reputation.
We knew the meat sauce would be our true challenge. It had to be good. And it had to be unique.
Deciding where to land, ingredient-wise, was no easy task. Hot dog meat sauce recipes are all over the place. An incomplete list of ingredients that can be found in a meat sauce include: onion, mustard, vinegar, sugar, Worcestershire sauce, celery seed, hot pepper sauce, ketchup, cinnamon, chili powder, paprika, cloves, tomato paste, allspice, garlic powder, beef suet, bay leaf, cumin, beef broth, onion powder, nutmeg, ginger, thyme, oregano and corn starch.
Mary Kate and I took the assignment seriously. I bought several pounds of ground beef and white onions. I didn’t need to buy any spices, because I’m a spice fiend and I own every type of spice in creation. Our test buns were Schmidt Old Tyme. We grilled the buns every time. (Our stove has a griddle, as luck would have it.)
We spent several weekends testing meat sauces. We started with known meat sauce recipes I had found on the Internet (every now and then, a hot dog joint’s secret recipe slips through the cracks and gets published) or famous ones that are sold as spice mixes in stores. I used these as a baseline of what was out there in terms of regional styles; this would give me an idea of what I wanted in my meat sauce. One recipe we tried was a typical Rochester-style meat sauce; another was a Providence-style blend.
Each meat sauce took a while to make, because most are cooked down slowly until almost no moisture is left in the spiced meat. Some or the resultant sauces were too dry, some were too spicy. Some were dark and dense, others more sauce-like.
I should mention here that when I’m talking about meat sauce, I am not talking about chili. Chili dogs are another thing entirely. Chili is a meal unto itself. When you make a chili dog, you are putting a food on top of a food. You don’t eat meat sauce by itself; it is typically too bitter and sharp. Meat sauce is a hot dog condiment, just as mustard or relish are.
For a while, we experimented with using celery salt as an additional condiment, in the Rhode Island tradition. But it proved to be a bridge too far, condiment-wise; what with the pork roll, there was too much going on. In the end, we instead integrated the celery salt into the meat sauce.
What did I finally settle on? Well, in the grand tradition of hot dog secrecy, I am not going to reveal the exact recipe of our meat sauce. Sorry. You’ll have to try a Simonson Dog and figure that out for yourself. It will be available at PDT at least through the end of summer.
Odds and Ends…
Throughout the course of Hot Dog Week, various restaurants have contacted me to let me know about hot dogs that recently made their debut on their menus. Here are a few:
Bar Bastion, the cocktail bar above Michelin-Starred Midtown restaurant, Le Jardinier, recently launched a new menu for the bar. It includes The Road Dog, a wild boar sausage with bacon and onion jam. It is $14.
The brand of Smith & Mills in Rockefeller Center just put a hot dog on the menu. It is a beef and pork frank served with whole grain mustard, bacon, relish and a garlic aioli that they brûlée.
Mile End Deli in Brooklyn has launched Weenie Wednesdays. On Wednesday, you can enjoy their Hoyt Dog, they are located on Hoyt Street (an all-beef dog on a challah roll with relish and sauerkraut) for only $6. There will also be a rotating wiener special every week for $10. Last week’s special was a Chicago Dog.
In other news, Hamburger America, George Motz’s celebrated Manhattan shrine to the hamburger arts, will, for one day only on July 4, serve hot dogs! The weenie in question will be a spin on the classic New York hot dog cart dirty water dog… The 2nd annual Portland Wurst Week Ever will return June 24-30. So far, four restaurants are participating… On Saturday, June 8, at 2 p.m., I will be speaking about the new Martini age at Martine, as part of the 2024 Rochester Cocktail Revival… On Tuesday, June 11, at 12:30, I will be signing copies of my book The Encyclopedia of Cocktails at Brooklyn Bar Convent. Also signing books over the course of the two-day convention will be Frank Caiafa, Camper English, Nicola Nice, Elva Ramirez, and Aaron Goldfarb… On Wednesday, June 12, I will be back at BCB, this time stirring up some Martinis from 3:30 to 5:30 at the Haus Alpenz booth.
Well, that’s a wrap on The Mix’s first-ever Hot Dog Week! We hope you enjoyed it. If you did, and are not yet a Mix follower please subscribe. We are exhausted and full and are going to take a week off to rest up. See you next Friday at cocktail hour!
-Robert and Mary Kate
I loved Hot Dog Week!!! Weeeeeeeeee! 🌭🌭🌭🍸🍸🍸👻👻👻
It’s been a fun week of dogs and wieners! Did I miss your preferred cocktail to accompany the Simonson dog?