An unofficial archive · Chicago, 2003–2014
Hot Doug's opened on West Roscoe in 2003, burned out in 2004, reopened on North California Avenue and closed there on 3 October 2014.
What survives of its menu is scattered across archived web pages, a spreadsheet somebody kept by hand, and a decade of tweets.
This is that, put back together and made playable.
A hot dog stand on Grand Avenue, a counter on Roscoe, and the thing both of them had that a spreadsheet can't hold.
Sources, gaps and methodWhere all of this came from, what it can't tell you, and who actually did the work of writing it down.
One wild animal a week for eleven years. Never pork, never chicken, never beef. Build one and find out whether Doug got there first.
Each week a sausage got somebody's name on it, usually the name they were born with rather than the one you'd know them by.
The rest of the board, ten or so a day. Where nearly all the variety lived, and where a sausage might quietly have been a Celebrity the week before.
Every sausage and every topping, all three boards pooled together with no rule about which came from where.
Pick a date. See what was on the board, and where each line came from, an archived page, the spreadsheet, or a tweet.
Steven Caputo did not compile the original menu history. Someone else did that, by hand, years ago, and their spreadsheet is the backbone of everything here. They aren't identified. If you know who they are, get in touch they should be named on this page.
Unofficial and noncommercial. No connection to Hot Doug's, to Doug Sohn, or to anyone who worked there. No logo, no trade dress, no photographs, no menu scans, nothing from the book, only dates and the names of things that were served.