A Tale of Two Hot Dogs

A Tale of Two Hot Dog Stands

a Culinary Review by Psykko Butcher

There are those people in life who are so obsessed with the superficial images of things that they become enveloped in a mist of their own illusions.  These are the Sham Mirrors, to borrow from Arcturus, set up in the culinary landscape to sell a simulcrum of a thing.  They proliferate, in gentrified parts of town, and account for so many duplications of the primordial Irish Pub that I can scarcely look at a backlit plastic shamrock without retching

  Rockstar dogs, despite its wonderful location, and vintage edifice, bisected by decades past road expansion to mere sliverhood, is such a place.  the hot dogs are named after rock bands, yes, though nothing so adventurous as a plague bringer, or an anal cunt.  No matter, the staff is underpaid and consequently inefficient and unfriendly, and the dogs all taste the same.  True, the hot dog is a synthetic culinary life form known for its dubiousness.  Still, my Led Zepplein was the same crap I could get for much cheaper at a real fry pit llike Mr. G's, and be surrounded by actual grease, not kitsch grease.  The fries at Rockstar suck too.  Burned, from staff obliviousness, and probably supplied by the Aramark cesspool.

  I will gossip, dear reader, and mention that the owner, Dion Antic is a legendary charlatan, a kitschmaster par excellance, founder of such culinary dens of iniquity as Iggys and others too numerous to mention.  Iggys, in its day, was lovely though, for all the cocaine left over on the tables and the waitstaff, so buxxom and tatttooed as to ooze rockandroll.   there is no rock here, only crap food.  801 n Ashland and there is on on armitage, open late, but why go?

   By contrast, Hot Doug's is a shrine to the dark god of the Wiener.  Far off, in an unfashionable stretch of California, it draws culinary pilgrims from every distant planet.  the line is formidable here, my bandmates and I have never escaped waiting outside, often in the rain, for a hot dog.  But oh, what hot dogs.  Rabbit meat, Fois gras, Venison, authentic Cincinnati chili, Duck Fat Fries, and busy staff that somehow manage to be polite and funny.   They work in the halls of the gods, plain and simple.    3324 north california m-sa 10:30-4