Long dog's journey into bites at Cookers Red Hots
Vienna Beef's 2-pound, 22-inch hot dogs are out of scale with almost everything else on earth.
Their size renders them less credible as food than as visual entertainment, akin to the purple gorillas atop car dealers, the Popeye balloon in the Thanksgiving Day parade and Sammy Sosa's head.
(Buzz Orr/Staff Photographer)
(Buzz Orr/Staff Photographer)
PHOTO GALLERY
Cookers Red Hots
If they were actual legitimate food products, bakers would make buns to accommodate them. Restaurant supply companies would sell red plastic baskets big enough to serve them.
They don't.
Even so, Vienna delivered 160 of these freakish sausages recently to Cookers Red Hots, a fast-food emporium at 469 Lake-Cook Road in Deerfield, as a sort of big beefy joke.
There is not much of anything else to do with them.
They had been created for a White Sox promotion at the club level of U.S. Cellular Field, Vienna's Bob Schwartz said.
That didn't work out, he said, "because the hot dog is so big. I think it's wider than their seat.
"And it's an expensive hot dog," he added.
Ten bucks apiece wholesale, said Cookers' Brian Zabel, who priced them retail at $19.99.
Free, if you can eat one in an hour. And you get a T-shirt.
"It's not the idea to make money off it, just to kind of have fun to see if they can really eat it," he said.
He did the math: Grocery hot dogs come eight to a pound, so eating the big Vienna is like choking down 16.
But those would be nestled in easy-to-consume white bread buns.
"The bread will be the real problem in eating one of these," Zabel said on the eve of the Vienna delivery.
"I bought 36-inch Turano French rolls for 'em. I cut off a foot to give people a fighting chance. But that's still a lot of roll."
He scores and grills the big dogs, as he does most of the normal ones he sells every day. The big ones stretch lewdly most of the way across the grill.
The initial customer to try the massive frankfurter knocked it off in about half an hour. The second man took much longer.
"The first guy was about 6-6, 250. The second guy was about 100 pounds," said Dennis Dougherty, a customer who saw them both.
The first man left with a spring in his step, but not the second.
"He didn't look too good," Dougherty said. "He looked like he was about to spew."
Michael Sperling, Pioneer's vice president of advertising, and I had promised to try our luck. Sperling took a look at one of the dogs resplendent in its big loaf of bread and shook his head.
"I don't think I can do that," he said.
But he gave it a shot, opting to keep it simple, with just mustard, relish, onions and celery salt. I ordered mine with everything, including peppers, because I like hot dogs that way. And it makes better pictures.
Sperling got his first, and cut it into four pieces while I collected my own tray. By the time I turned around and got back to the table, his first quarter was almost gone.
Before I cut up mine, I took a bite out of one end, for the camera. That sounds easy, but picking up and trying to eat a floppy 2-foot sandwich is like trying to stick the face of a world's record northern pike in your mouth.
Zabel was right about the roll. It took away the easy pleasure of eating a hot dog. The hot peppers and tomatoes became minor players in a very carbohydrate-intensive experience.
One foot-long quarter was plenty. By the time I finished it, Sperling had one to go. It was history before I finished my first half, and I knew by then that was about all I was going to do.
And the Cookers crowd was giving Sperling an ovation. He had neatly and quietly dispatched the monster in 13 minutes.
A customer walked up to Sperling, shook his hand, and told him about an out-of-state restaurant where he could get big free steaks just for eating them.
The man then turned to me and graphically insulted my masculinity.
I asked Sperling if he liked what he ate.
"It was good," he shrugged. "It was a free meal."