Hot Dogs Are Going Extinct?
Find out why hot dogs may be going the way of the dodo bird.
This article is more than 2 years old
Say it isn’t so! Hot dogs, no longer? Now, before you go about getting your mystery meat stick-addled brain in a tiff, hot dogs are not off the leash and walking away from us on the whole. There are just certain places where we no longer seem to find them. Yes, we are talking about fast food joints.
When we think of popular fast-food restaurants, McDonald’s, Burger King, and even Wendy’s comes to mind. Those are what many across the country consider to be the big three. Although those three are known most notably for their hamburgers, they have tried to incorporate the hot dog onto their main menus in the recent and distant past.
Yes, all three have tried, and yes, all three have failed spectacularly. True, we will always have (we hope) national chains such as Sonic Drive-In, or regional joints in the Midwest like Portillo’s to satisfy our dog craving, but why did the dog on a bun fail in some of the most popular food joints across the nation? The mystery is almost as mysterious as the meat in the mystery meat stick. Let’s see if we can don our Sherlock Holmes deerstalker cap and suck on that pipe while we figure this thing out.
Ray Kroc famously said this about the hot dog in his book, Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald’s, “There’s a damned good reason we should never have hot dogs. There’s no telling what’s inside a hot dog’s skin, and our standard of quality just wouldn’t permit that kind of item.” The game’s afoot. If Kroc didn’t know the contents of a hot dog, did anyone? Kroc forbade hot dogs to be part of McDonald’s menu, so it took his passing in 1984 before it would see the light of day at the Golden Arches.
Yes, McDonald’s did give the hot dog a go. This was in 1991 when they nauseously delighted the public with their Hot Dog McNuggets.
You would have thought that a previous McDonald’s dog failure would have turned the company away from them, but it didn’t. Yes, McDonald’s did give the hot dog a go. The McHotDog was a 1995 creation. It was seen in Midwestern McDonald’s restaurants as a summertime item. Its failure was immediate, not even lasting long enough to deserve its given title of “limited-time” summer item. The failure of the McHotDog goes along with other epic McDonald’s failures like the McSpaghetti, the McHula Burger, and the McPizza.
Back in the mid-’80s and shortly after Wendy’s began asking customers “Where’s the beef?” the food chain decided to jump into the other meat market by releasing their version of the dog complete with cheese and chili along with traditional fixings on a toasted bun. For a while there, Wendy’s made some sales. The elongated meat item continued to sell well enough to remain on Wendy’s menu for a number of years until 1989 when the last thing seen of Wendy’s hot dog was their “Take a Long Hot Dog” commercial.
And then there was Burger King. They were the last of the big three to give the hot dog a ride and they were as short-lived as the McHotDog. Introduced in 2016, the Grilled Dogs made an immediate impact and gained notoriety from New York Post columnist Steve Cuozzo, who called them a “culinary calamity” and a “disgusting disgrace.” In part, he wrote: “I’ve enjoyed every breed of Big Apple hot dog — from Coney Island to Pelham Bay Park to the Halal guy near the Hudson Yards No. 7 station who recently sold me the best I’ve ever had—and I’ll say without hiccupping: Burger King’s are the worst embarrassment in the name of cylindrical meat matter since Anthony Weiner tweeted his wiener.” Ouch. To both.
Although you won’t be seeing those famous mystery meat sticks on the menus of the big three, the hot dog is still a very popular item across the nation. In the early days on the West Coast, you had the uber-popular Doggie Diner that specialized in hot dogs. They started serving the popular dogs in 1948 in the San Francisco Bay Area and grew to over 30 locations that even crossed over to the East Bay. Sadly, they went out of business in 1986, but what they did show is that a hot dog diner could flourish.
Now, these “doggie” diners are everywhere, from the west coast all the way to the east coast. Cities such as Chicago and New York are known for their hot dogs. There is Dat Dog in New Orleans, Biker Jim’s Gourmet Hot Dogs in Denver, Angelo’s Coney Island in Grand Blanc, Michigan, and Diggity Dog in Seattle. Of course, there are many, many more and they shouldn’t be hard to find.
So, while the “h-dogs” may be extinct in some of the more popular fast-food joints, they haven’t been erased completely. Something worth noting – you won’t find yourself having to guess at what’s inside those cylindrical tubes of wonderment in most of these specialized hot dog joints. It’s all-beef franks. Right?
