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| - If you are going to charge a premium price for hot dogs, you had better get everything right. Any fool can buy decent, high quality hot dogs at their local butcher or even most big name grocery chains now.... and cooking a hot dog isn't exactly difficult, so to make a business like this worth walking into for me, you need the following:
1 - a hot dog I can't get elsewhere.
2- good quality bun, preferably more than one type
3- a wide variety of toppings, all top quality
Franktuary gets none of this right. You have 3 hot dog choices: vegetarian, regular beef, or locally grown organic beef. The regular beef frank is $2.90 with no toppings, and the organic beef is $5.30 plain!?!?!? I paid under $5 for an organic, locally sourced lamb hot dog with toppings at a ballpark in Frederick, MD - and that hot dog was handed to me, and prepared by, Bryan Voltaggio of Top Chef. Right off the bat, this place struck me as overpriced, but I figured I'd dive in anyway.
The bun is your standard, bland, mainly only there as a holster for the hot dog type of bun. Their toppings - mostly just sad. They seem to shop for the majority of their toppings in the condiment aisle of the grocery store. The chili tasted like it was canned, the saurkraut tasted about the same, and the blue cheese dressing not only tasted prepackaged, it tasted like horribly cheap prepackaged dressing.
The nail in the coffin for me was the Pittsburgh dog, topped with pierogie and cole slaw. In case you don't know, pierogies have been a staple Pittsburgh food forever, so if you're going to sell them, they had better be good. These were not. I don't know if they were prepackaged (if they were, SHAME ON YOU Franktuary! You can by fresh ones at church bake sales in Pittsburgh for goodness sake), but mine were hard around the edges where they had obviuosly been precooked and then reheated, most likely in a microwave.
Just avoid this place. It's simply not worth their ridiculous markup. Go to your local grocery store, buy some good quality hot dogs and rolls, and for the $30 you'll save by not going to Franktuary, you can top them with lobster if you want and still have change.
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