Chicago Hot Dog appears as a signature dish in 1 United States cities. See each city's local variant and where to eat it.
Chicago hot dog · Chicago
An all-beef Vienna frank on a poppy-seed bun, dragged through the garden: yellow mustard, neon-green relish, chopped onion, tomato, sport peppers, pickle, celery salt.
Vienna Beef has been making the canonical frankfurter in Chicago since 1893, when Austro-Hungarian immigrants Emil Reichel and Sam Ladany debuted theirs at the World's Columbian Exposition. The fully dressed Chicago dog crystallised during the Depression, when Maxwell Street vendors gave you a hot meal of a frank, salad and pickle for a nickel. Ketchup has been banned by unwritten city law for at least sixty years, a rule that locals enforce with both gentle eye-rolling and absolute seriousness; the prohibition was reaffirmed by the late Mayor Richard M. Daley in public on more than one occasion. The poppy-seed bun is from S. Rosen's, the city's other 100-year-old bakery.
Where to eat in Chicago:
- Superdawg Drive-In
- The Wieners Circle
- Portillo's Hot Dogs
- Gene & Jude's