Sources, gaps and method
“Yes, we get it, you like data a little too much, and love Chicago food…but where does it all come from?” you might ask..
Hot Doug's ran for roughly 4,073 days, from August 10th, 2003 to October 3rd, 2014, Monday to Saturday, first at 2314 West Roscoe, then, after the building burned, at 3324 North California Avenue. That's about 3,491 days of slangin sausages.
This archive has a record for roughly one in six of them.
Everything below is an attempt to be exact about which one in six, and why the rest is gone.
The archived pages date the move themselves. Seven captures carry 2314 West Roscoe, the last on 5 December 2004. Every capture from 4 February 2005 onward carries 3324 North California. Nothing was crawled in between, so the archive can bracket the move but not date it, and the December capture may simply be a page nobody had updated since the fire. Any date more precise than “between those two” would be coming from somewhere other than this data.
The Wayback Machine crawled hotdougs.com/specials.htm 220 times over
eleven years. All 220 captures have been fetched and parsed, and that source is
exhausted, there is no 221st. This is where the full days come from. The early
years are thin for the plainest possible reason: three captures in all of 2003, four
in 2004, nine in 2005. Nothing was lost through carelessness. Those are all the
photographs anyone ever took.
2,245 records, compiled by hand, years before this project. It covers the same ground as the page captures and confirms them: 97.6% of its dishes reproduce exactly from the archived pages. It also revealed how it had been made. The pages read Sausage with A, B and C, and the phrase “with” appears zero times across all 2,245 main dishes, because it wasn't missing, it was the delimiter.
From February 2009 Doug announced the Game of the Week and the Celebrity Sausage nearly every day. 375 of those announcements were recovered. They are the only reason the later years have any detail at all, and the only place the celebrity sausages are named after anybody.
73% of records are confirmed by more than one source. Where two disagree on wording, the archived page wins, then the spreadsheet, then the tweet.
The Game of the Week and the Celebrity Sausage each ran for a week at a time, so a single sighting says something about the days around it. One tweet states a run outright, “The Game of the Week ~ 3/9–3/14”, Monday to Saturday. Two strengths of deduction are used, and they are kept apart because they are not equally safe:
Deduced days are never counted as days on record. The everyday specials get no inference at all, they changed constantly, and knowing what was on the board Monday tells you nothing about Wednesday.
Sundays are excluded throughout. The shop was shut, and the data says so on its own: across 375 tweets, all posted on days it was open, not one went up on a Sunday.
The last tweet, 3 October 2014:
Good morning! Our line, and Hot Doug's in a more general sense, can accommodate no new customers. We love you & we thank you, my friends.
Steven Caputo did not compile the original menu history. Someone else did that work, by hand, and their spreadsheet is the backbone of everything here. They are not identified. If you know who they are, get in touch, they should be named on this page, prominently.
This site is unofficial and noncommercial. It has no connection to Hot Doug's, to Doug Sohn, or to anyone who worked there. It carries no logo, no trade dress, no photographs, no menu scans and nothing from the book, only dates and the names of things that were served.