Hot Doug's
restaurant in Chicago, Illinois, United States
Hot Doug's was a Chicago, Illinois-based restaurant specializing in a variety of hot dogs and sausages. The self-proclaimed "Sausage Superstore and Encased Meat Emporium" was in its second location at 3324 North California Avenue in the city's Avondale neighborhood before it closed on October 3, 2014. Its first location, on Roscoe Street, closed after a 2004 fire. Hot Doug's was frequently featured in local and national media for its unique menu, and its purveyor and head chef, Doug Sohn, has been noted for his work to create affordable gourmet food. The restaurant was an extremely popular dining destination among both locals and tourists, and at lunch time and throughout much of the weekend customers could expect to wait in lines sometimes exceeding 4 hours just to get in the door.
The names attached to the permanent menu items were changed frequently but usually maintain a consistent theme: iconic Hollywood sex symbols, legendary comedians, famous Chicago Cubs baseball players, and so on. Hot Doug's was also notable for its duck fat fries, served on Fridays and Saturdays only, in which the potatoes are deep fried in rendered duck fat.
Hot Doug's is the subject of the 2016 documentary Hot Doug's: The Movie.
Accolades
Hot Doug's won a 2006 Good Eating award from the Chicago Tribune, which noted the restaurant's "cult status" among hot dog aficionados. Hot Doug's has been featured as a Critics Pick on CBS, NBC, ABC, and the Travel Channel, and was featured in the Chicago episode of Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations.
The public source identifies “Hot Doug's” as restaurant in Chicago, Illinois, United States. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Doug's, restaurant and Chicago.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hot Doug's” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.