New York Street Food

Hot Doug's

Huffington Post recently had a feature on the best hot dogs in Chicago.  Among their favorites – Hot Doug’s, Superdawg, Weiner’s Circle and Jimmy’s Red Hots – as well as the Wrigleyville Dogs and White Sox Dog at the two baseball stadia. [Huff Po]

We love pickles and relish on hot dogs, but tomatoes we can do without.

Wrigleyville

Crain’s Chicago Business reports on Hot Dog University, run by the Vienna Beef Ltd. from their North Side headquarters.  The combination of high unemployment, the increased buzz being received by street food vendors, and the opportunity to be your own boss, has led to an increase of 30% in students attending Hot Dog U, a two day crash course in operating a hot dog cart.

Among the lessons being taught are “Always dress the dog, and not the bun”, the proper technique for shaking water off a dog (don’t get any on the bun), and how to apply condiments the Chicago way: yellow mustard, pickle relish, chopped onion, tomato wedges, pickle spear, sport peppers and a sprinkle of celery salt.  Also, steaming the bun is “a science” aimed at achieving a “pillowy-soft” consistency, and a properly cooked hot dog “snaps” when bitten, but will split or crack if left in water too long.  “It’s a business of minute details,” Mr. Reitman says, a hot dog lover who grew up on Chicago’s West Side, who started teaching people how to operate hot dog carts four years ago in Milwaukee and joined Vienna as its “professor of hot dogs” in 2009.

Vienna charges $699 for a cart class and $1,499 for one on how to run a stand.  But the company provides food and merchandise rebates equal to the tuition cost for graduates who sell Vienna dogs.  A cart requires an investment of $3,000 to $6,000, depending on the size and design. A stand, which is a permanent structure, requires $100,000 or more.  Mr. Reitman says a well-run cart can sell 100 hot dogs in a four-hour lunch period and reap an annual profit of more than $50,000.

As with most food businesses, success boils down to location. Mr. Reitman advises his charges to choose a regular spot with high visibility, plenty of foot traffic, no competition and ample parking. Proximity to trash cans and public restrooms (“for your customers and yourself”) is also critical.  Spots outside bars in college towns can be lucrative: “If you’re up for some late nights, a hot dog is a popular option when leaving the bar.”  In the end, it’s a numbers game, he says. “You need thousands of people to walk by in order to sell hundreds of hot dogs.” [Chicago Business]

That’s why street food works so well in New York – the vast amount of people walking by many different locations. Another way to get attention is the Willy Dog cart.

'The Professor" and his students

After the positive feedback I received about the kimchi-bulgogi hot dog post on Saturday (including Oleg from Schnitzel & Things‘s breathless question about where he can get one), I did a little more research about fusion hot dogs.  Vancouver seems to have some pretty good ones.

If anyone is going to the Winter Olympics, which start this weekend, you might want to check out their great street food.  Vancouver is a well-known foodie city, with access to a lot of fresh ingredients nearby.  The city also has a very strong Asian influence.

Terimayo

One of the street food favorites is Japa Dog, which has 3 locations on the streets of Vancouver.  One version of the Japa Dog is the Terimayo, an all-beef hot dog smothered in Japanese soy mayo, thick teriyaki sauce, sauteed onions, and a generous sprinkling of nori (seaweed flakes).  There’s also Misomayo, a turkey hot dog dressed with miso-mayo, sesame sauce, and kaiware (bitter daikon sprouts that have a wasabi-hot “kick”), and Orishi, a bratwurst frank loaded with special soy sauce, green onions, and grated daikon.  Wow!

Orishi

For a somewhat less intense, but surely delicious hot dog, there’s the Tandoori Tikka Dog, created by Sam Saleem, who moved to Vancouver from California. His dogs have onions fried in butter covering a chicken or kosher beef sausage with homemade tandoori paste. Sounds pretty good, too.

TandooriTikkaDog

Vancouver 24 hit the streets to “find the top dog” (their pun, not mine).  In addition to the Japa Dog and the Tandoori Tikka Dog, they also included Mr. Tube Steak.  Video below.

Today’s Lunch is a kimchi-bulgogi hot dog from New York Hot Dog & Coffee, located at 245 Bleecker St (west of 6th Ave, by Leroy Street).

I must confess, when they moved into my neighborhood last year, we refused to try them because they replaced Pasticceria Bruno, one of our favorite places for Italian cakes and pastries, and we were pissed.  I know Bruno has another location on LaGuardia Place, but I passed this one almost every day and their pastries were works of art.  We know it was probably the landlord’s fault that Bruno closed, but we didn’t want to patronize the store that replaced our beloved Pasticceria Bruno.  And the name, New York Hot Dog & Coffee…it just sounded so tourist-y.

Well, they say time heals all wounds, and I love both bulgogi and hot dogs, so it was time to give it a try.  The person in front of me was being served as I walked up to the counter, and it looked really good, so I asked what her order was.  They said it was #7, a kimchi-bulgogi hot dog, which is a spicy hot dog with both kimchi and bulgogi on top.  There was an option of having this with a regular hot dog, but I went with the spicy dog.

The hot dog is grilled, put on a piece of lettuce on a hot dog bun, topped with kimchi and bulgogi, and sprinkled with sesame seeds.  It was piled high and quite a mouthful, but worth the effort.  Very tasty.  The hot dog was not the highest quality hot dog in the world, but it was good, and covered in kimchi and bulgogi, it was even better.  The kimchi was spicy, but the hot dog wasn’t really spicy, and the bulgogi gave it a nice balance.  Next time I want to try the dak-kalbi, spicy chicken with lettuce and pickles on a hot dog bun.

One more confession.  I actually snuck in and tried the bulgogi hot dog last year when this place was still under my house’s boycott.  It sounded too unique not to try.  While the bulgogi hot dog was good, the kimchi-bulgogi hot dog was much better.  The spiciness really made it come alive.

Is a kimchi-bulgogi hot dog street food?  Who cares, it was delicious.  (For the record, we’re going to add New York Hot Dog & Coffee to our Honorary Street Food category and put it on the New York Street Food map.)  Welcome to the neighborhood.

Two students at the Trinity School on the Upper West Side spent four months collecting 217 samples of organisms in their neighborhoods in order to study DNA barcoding.  They were trying to identify the various species they were surrounded by in their daily lives.

Most of the conclusions were expected, until they examined a tiny specimen that they had found lying on its back in a West Side apartment.  What first appeared to be a dead American cockroach could be a previously undocumented species.  Further study is required before it can be determined by the American Museum of Natural History whether the two students came across a new species of cockroach, but that’s pretty amazing.

But it was nothing compared to what they found when they tested a New York street hot dog.  Just as amazing to the young native New Yorkers was that the hot dog bought on the street showed nothing but cow DNA.  While most New Yorkers expect some beef in their hot dogs, we kind of expect other things to be in there as well.  What exactly the other things are, we don’t dwell on too often.

A similar project was run about a year ago with two other Trinity students, and they found that the fish in several sushi restaurants in the city had been misrepresented. What was advertised as white tuna, for instance, turned out to be tilapia, a much cheaper fish.

This time around, Mr. Cost and Ms. Tan, who both volunteered to conduct the research, discovered that 11 of 66 typical household food items were mislabeled, including sheep’s milk cheese that was in fact made of cow’s milk, venison dog treats that were made of beef and sturgeon caviar that was actually Mississippi paddlefish. [NY Times]

Guess I’ll have to bring my portable DNA testing lab out to lunch next time.