My father was obsessed with hot dogs, to the point of distraction, and although he could discuss Bellow, Shostakovich or Jerome Kern for hours, he was happiest, I think, expounding on the great frankfurters of his youth: the taut, garlicky specimens he grew up eating, on Maxwell Street and at the original Fluky’s in Chicago.
Anne Fishbein
Anne Fishbein
The Infield's unorthodox Twinkie Dog
Anne Fishbein
Marty D's kosher frank
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The Infield's unorthodox Twinkie Dog
Anne Fishbein
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Marty D's kosher frank
Anne Fishbein
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A classic model from QT Chicago Dogs.
Want to see more dogs? Click here for Anne Fishbein's gallery of L.A.'s top Chicago-style hot dogs.
“A proper hot dog,” he explained with the reverence I always imagined other fathers saved for the mysteries of Sandy Koufax or the Talmud, “is topped with yellow mustard, relish and chopped raw onion; sprinkled with celery salt; garnished with a spear of new pickle; and served in a soft, steamy poppy-seed bun. Hot sport peppers on top are not essential, but preferred — the vinegar leaks down and flavors the meat. The tomatoes may be either sliced or in wedges, but they have to be added after, not before, the celery salt. The hot dog, it goes without saying, has to come from Vienna Beef. No catsup.”
He closed his eyes and sighed. If he couldn’t have a Chicago hot dog, he could at least talk about one.
Not surprisingly, weekends were often dominated by his search for hot dogs in Los Angeles, and he would drive me and my brothers around for hours in the old Studebaker on the rare occasions he found a stand that he liked. He made regular trips to a favored stand way down in La Jolla. The greatest discovery of his last years was a Mexican lunch place in Brentwood, whose owners just happened to serve decent hot dogs, at least, until they dropped the Vienna product for an inferior frank.
So it was not surprising that I found myself in my truck last weekend with my children in the back seat and a fistful of addresses on the dash. For what does their heritage mean if it does not include hot dog expeditions fueled by cheap root beer?
The first stop was Marty D’s, a slick, cherried-out New York–style diner in Beverly Hills, whose hot dogs had been widely praised. In the ’60s and the ’70s, Beverly Hills was basically a wealthy Jewish suburb of Brooklyn, whose sons and daughters made up so much of the film industry. The Erasmus High reunions in the city were famously bigger than both the Beverly Hills High reunions and those thrown by Erasmus in Brooklyn itself. And there has usually been at least one Beverly Hills diner that served nostalgic Brooklyn cuisine, which is to say, hot dogs, egg creams and fried knishes, tuna fish sandwiches and chocolate malteds.
There is a lot to like about Marty D’s, from the excellent French fries to the hot-fudge sundaes made with Dandy Don’s ice cream, from the Brill Building songs on the sound system to the almost aggressively cheerful demeanor of the staff. The cherry rickey with fresh lime was pretty great, bracing and not too sweet, maybe the best version of the fizzy drink I’ve tasted since the old Dolores drive-in on Wilshire closed in the 1980s, and the egg cream was first-rate. Marty D. himself, a director known for New Yorky films like TheLords of Flatbush and Eddie and the Cruisers, was on hand, rocking local show-biz gossip, circa 1963. There was a crisp, formidable square potato knish. The hot dogs were perhaps the least interesting things about the restaurant, hefty but bland kosher franks riddled with black fissures, grilled at blast-furnace heat — they tasted like the hot dogs you may have experimented with in Cub Scouts, the kind you impale on a stick and wither in a bonfire. To his credit, Marty D. seemed concerned that we weren’t finishing our dogs. But we were happy enough with the “Frrrozen Hot Chocolate,” a slushy milk shake, one of the beloved New York treats of the 1960s, whose recipe Marty D. had managed to finagle from its innovators at the Upper East Side restaurant Serendipity 3.
The next stop, Portillo’s, was 45 minutes away, in the Buena Park Mall, in the parking lot of a giant Wal-Mart. It is a long way to drive for a hot dog. But Portillo’s is the only area restaurant of a genuine Chicago hot dog parlor, a chain that proliferates mostly in the endless suburbia that Midwestern radio announcers call “Chicagoland” but with a prominent outlet in the tourist-intensive River North neighborhood I had enjoyed a few years ago. Portillo’s is a giant, old-timey barn of a restaurant, filled with unnaturally pale customers who look as if they’ve just arrived from a leisurely, beer-lubricated softball game — in other words, like Chicagoans. If you ignored the fact that Knott’s Berry Farm is right down the street, you could be in Berwyn or someplace, grabbing lunch after a morning at the big-box store. The hot dogs too were authentically Chicago: the Vienna frank, the neon-green relish (by request), the sport peppers, the tomatoes and the mustard. On the walls were testimonials from Ann Landers and Jim Belushi. But the dog didn’t snap, nor did the condiments sing — it was just a hot dog, good enough to lend the general sense of well-being that accompanies a dog at Costco — not quite good enough to justify the drive.
