It’s likely my relationship with Hot Doug’s started long before Hot Doug’s existed.
When I was a kid, my dad used to take me to a little place called Aldo’s on Grand Avenue. We lived down the block, and Aldo’s was one of those neighborhood places that probably didn’t look remarkable to anyone driving past it. To me, it was Chicago.
It was where I had my first Chicago-style hot dog, my first pizza puff, and my first Italian sub. Aldo was always there, and was always so nice to us. As I got older, it became a place I would walk to with neighborhood kids before we headed to Hanson Park to play baseball. Years later I described it as “Cheers, but for hot dogs.” I still think that is about right.
Aldo’s taught me something about a type of Chicago food before I knew I was learning it. The food matters. But these are also places where somebody behind a counter sees you, asks how you are doing, gives you something good to eat, and sends you back into the world.
Years later, I found another one.
Working in the area, I went to the original Hot Doug’s on Roscoe for lunch way too many days out of the week before the fire and the move. Doug was behind the counter. He was always behind the counter, with what I can only describe as the world’s most genuine smile. You would walk in, Doug would ask how you were, and you would talk for a minute while you ordered. “What can I get you my friend!”
“..my friend” was like an adjective to this guy.
“Charred fire dog, everything on it, add sauerkraut, hold the relish, order of fries.”
I can still taste that entire order, bite for bite.
Without realizing it at first, I think I had found Aldo again, not the restaurant and not the food, but the feeling.
Doug happened to pair that feeling with one of the most creative menus I had ever seen: duck, wild boar, venison, alligator, and seemingly anything else that could fit into a casing, combined with cheeses, sauces, and toppings that had no apparent business at a neighborhood hot dog stand. Somehow, it still felt exactly like one.
The Roscoe location burned in 2004. Hot Doug’s reopened on California Avenue, became famous, and drew ridiculous lines. But when you finally reached the counter, there was Doug, still smiling, still asking how you were.
Hot Doug’s closed on October 3, 2014.
Years later, during the pandemic, I was on Twitter when I found something extraordinary. Someone had apparently (sloppily) recorded years of Hot Doug’s menus and turned them into data: dates, sausages, accompaniments, toppings, and thousands of combinations.
I downloaded it, and then it sat on a hard drive.
That file contains 2,245 little records of a restaurant that no longer exists. I do not want to build another site that merely tells people what Hot Doug’s was. I want to build a machine that lets them visit the surviving fragment: pick a date, see what was served, spin the machine, take the ingredients apart, put them back together, or invent something ridiculous only to discover that Doug had already made it years earlier.
This is not Hot Doug’s, and it is not Aldo’s. You cannot reconstruct places like those from a spreadsheet, because the most important parts were never in the spreadsheet. They were my dad taking me for a hot dog, Aldo behind the counter, walking to Hanson Park with my friends, and Doug asking how I was. They were that peculiar kind of Chicago hospitality where someone could hand you lunch wrapped in paper and, for a few minutes, make you feel like you belonged there.
The Great Sausage Configurator is my attempt to preserve one little piece of that.