Contra Costa Times, CA
June 15 2005

Relish? Bun? Casing? Where’s a wiener’s soul?

JOHN BIRDSALL: ALWAYS HUNGRY

There’s a dented poignancy about hot dogs, a scrappy rust-belt charm.
A hot dog can be the perfect food to celebrate summer’s quiet
nostalgia, evocative as the mosquito hum of a portable radio tuned
to baseball, the feel of a scarred redwood picnic table against your
elbows or the smell of a vinyl patio umbrella in the sun.

Drive down Oakland’s Third Street near Market — close to the port —
and you can see what’s left of a once-thriving community of wiener
stands, carried off by the rising tide of condo lofts and retail.

But on a recent afternoon, only two carts shelter along the shady
side of Third Street. At the corner of Martin Luther King, in front
of Markus Supply hardware store, Frenchie’s flaunts a faded poster
for Vienna Beef franks. Further on, just around the corner from the
entrance to the Charles P. Howard docks, West Hot Dog is a cart of
tarnished quilted stainless steel, partly obscured by potato chip bags
clipped to display trees, racks of chewing gum and plastic ice chests
packed with soda cans. A medium hot dog with everything (including
pickled jalapenos and a thick smear of mayonnaise) is smoky and very
tender, intensely gooey, sweet and tart.

Tasty, but you have to look elsewhere for the East Bay’s hot dog soul.

It’s hard to imagine anyplace more richly nostalgic than a barbershop
that’s become a hot dog stand, but Sam’s Dog House on San Pablo Dam
Road in El Sobrante looks brand new, thanks to an open-ended renovation
that has remade the place with stark white walls, a ketchup-and-mustard
color scheme and plastic picnic tables.

It’s been more than 20 years since barber Sam Lesti put away his
clippers and took up a pair of spring-loaded tongs, remaking Sam’s
Barber Shop as Sam’s Dog House. Mike and Renee Rowland bought the
business in 1997 when Lesti retired, but longtime employees Donna
Fellman and Pat Tulley have been assembling dogs at Sam’s almost
since the beginning.

The place has the feel of an informal community center. On a recent
afternoon, a customer stopped in for a Chili Dog, chatting with
Fellman across the room about his daughter’s graduation from junior
high. “That’s why I’m still here,” says Fellman of the customers
she’s come to know. “They’re all like family to me.”

A Sam’s Chili Cheese Dog is a rich confection on a Melamine plastic
plate: A Millers brand wiener plastered with mustard, under a ladle
of canned chili con carne, diced onion and a thick welter of grated
sharp cheddar. You eat it with a fork and knife, the bun soaking
up the chili’s gravy the way shortcake soaks up strawberry juice,
while little strings of melted cheese collect on your chin. It’s
sloppy and delicious.

But even after two decades of dousing dogs with chili, Sam’s feels
like a newcomer. There’s a deeper strain of East Bay hot dog culture,
tarnished and charming as a set of 1940s cufflinks.

No place exudes such a heady whiff of weenie tradition as Glenn’s
Hot Dog, quite literally in the shadow of the filigree metal arch
marking the entrance along MacArthur Boulevard of Oakland’s Laurel
neighborhood. It’s a tiny diner whose roof turns up along the street
facade like some well-loved ball cap’s bill; inside it’s varnished
knotty pine, boomerang-pattern Formica and a pop fountain dispensing
RC Cola and Tahitian Treat punch. Glenn’s is pure, concentrated,
grilled-onion-and-fry-oil-scented nostalgia.

But with a price tag of $3.50, the Jumbo Dog is pure 21st century —
it’s a thick Millers wiener, with mustard, relish, a drift of white
onion and a couple of ripe, soft tomato slices tucked in. Too bad
the bun is stale: A killing lapse.

A big part of the East Bay’s wiener nostalgia is tangled up in the
contentious history of an Oakland family. In the 1920s, Armenian
immigrant Kasper Koojoolian was hawking frankfurters in a Chicago
park; in 1930, he moved to Oakland and set up a wiener stand in north
Oakland. By 1939, Koojoolian was churning out Oakland weenie stands
as fast as a sausage grinder spits out forcemeat. But just as in the
opening act of some Shakespeare tragedy, family bickering compelled
the wiener king to split his realm in three: Koojoolian’s original
Kasper’s, a spin-off spelled “Casper’s” and a rogue stepdaughter’s
brazen play for authenticity named the Original Kasper’s. Even in
the 1940s, hot dog joints were elbowing each other for the crown of
wiener nostalgia.

These days, the unoriginal Original Kasper’s at 44th and Telegraph
(the little triangle-shaped stand, with its neon chef trailing a
string of franks) is a holy relic of the old-time urban wiener —
and a moldering one. It’s been closed since 2002 (a note on its
Web site promises a reopening after unspecified repairs that don’t
appear to have begun). It’s safe to pronounce the Original Kasper’s
unofficially defunct.

But the Kasper’s that traces its lineage straight back to Koojoolian
— the one on MacArthur Boulevard in Oakland (filled with cops and
seniors on a recent afternoon) — keeps the wiener magic alive. Built
in 1961, it’s a gem of mid-20th century design. It’s got big jawbreaker
chandeliers, caramel-colored terrazzo floors and juicy striped
wallpaper in lemon, pink grapefruit and tangerine. The place is corny
and sophisticated, elegant and shabby — and the wieners are perfect.

They’re made of beef, with natural sheep casings; the taste is smoky,
salty and garlicky. A regular hot dog with everything is a Chicago
frank simplified: mustard and sweet relish, and slices of tomato and
white onion wedged between dog and bun like garden edging. The bun
is soft and scant, just right.

The weedy sourness of the unripe tomato (and the peppery fragrance of
its seeds) works on the wiener like a squeeze of lemon on an oyster,
taming its salt, giving it an aromatic presence, even over the brash
acidity of yellow mustard.

Kasper’s cousin Casper’s has had a parallel evolution, with onion and
tomato slices, mustard and relish, and buns as soft and collapsible
as a slice of steamed sponge cake. The decor in several of Caspers’
11 restaurants has a faded midcentury classicism that reminds you of
its homonym, with multi-colored vinyl stools in Froot Loops pastels
and signs with big ’60s-style graphic icons (a pot of mustard,
a slice of onion, a whimsical curving wiener).

The big difference at Casper’s is that wiener, which contains pork
as well as beef. It’s pale, with a tender, almost creamy texture and
pork’s nutty sweetness. It’s striking, old-fashioned and delicious —
as different from the traditional Chicago-style dog at Walnut Creek’s
Stadium Pub as you could imagine.

Owner Richard Sherman seeks to be the East Bay’s wiener proselytizer,
spreading the news of the authentic Chicago hot dog. In his Stadium
Pub sports bar, amid a tangle of high tables, TV sets flashing with
a confusion of games, in an atmosphere of mismatched bar stool
authenticity, a Chicago Dog looks just right in its red plastic
basket. It bristles with relish and diced onion, with tomato and
cucumber slices, under a thick pickle spear.

The Vienna Beef dog (flown in from Chicago along with the poppy seed
buns) is fat, with a thick, crisp skin. It nearly drips with rich,
heavy juice when you bite into it, and it’s powerfully saline (thanks
in part to a sprinkling of celery salt). That bun is so soft that
handling it compresses it into a kind of compact sheath.

It’s terrific — but unless you grew up in Chicago, crowding into
Demon Dogs under the Red Line El tracks near DePaul University, or
hanging out on the concrete picnic tables out front of Jansen’s on
the South Side, it’s all wrong, exotic rather than evocative.

Nostalgia is the most personal of self-indulgences. Especially when
it’s smeared with mustard.