SOUTHWORDS

Some years ago I tried to convince the editor of Coastal Living to do a story on the search for the ultimate beach hot dog. He looked at me as if I’d suggested he commit hari-kari with a shucking knife. If Coastal Living was going to talk about food, he said, that food was going to come out of the ocean one way or the other. I felt like a one-eyed king in the land of the blind.

This is not uncommon for those of us who consider the hot dog to be the most highly evolved of all God’s consumables. I came by this understanding as a mere child when dinner on humid summer nights often consisted of a hot dog and a refreshing pint of cold root beer at the B&K drive-in. Slather on the mustard. Dish on the relish. Sprinkle on the onion. No ketchup, please. We weren’t heathens, after all.

Later, as I matured, hot dogs purchased on sweltering afternoons at Wrigley Field from ballpark vendors singing “red hots, get yer red hots” as if it was Verdi’s Rigoletto only served to enhance my belief in the lofty place occupied by the hot dog in the hierarchy of all food. Passing hot dogs, slathered in mustard and chased by an Old Style, down a row of Cubs fans like a bucket brigade putting out a four alarm fire was its own rite of passage. No ketchup, of course. We weren’t savages, you know.

I have a friend at my pub, the Bitter and Twisted, who is as committed to the noble hot dog as anyone I’ve ever known. He is widely traveled, worldly beyond my comprehension, and he claims, with apologies to his West Texas roots, that the very best hot dog he’s ever had was in Reykjavik, Iceland, at Bæjarins Beztu Pylsur, which translates to “The Town’s Best Hot Dogs.” People line up down the block and around the corner to get them, he says. They sell 1,000 a day. If it’s not the town’s best dog I can’t imagine what is.

Hot dogs are beyond utilitarian. They are civilized — yet another reason why they reign supreme — which brings me to The Hot Dog Rule. I don’t mean to cast aspersions at Michelin and all its fancy-schmancy stars, but The Hot Dog Rule is as basic to the laws governing human behavior as not wearing a white shirt when you eat spaghetti. In sum, no sandwich should be more difficult to eat than a hot dog.

When it becomes necessary to deconstruct a sandwich as tall and as vertical on the plate as the leaning tower of Pisa, layered with slabs of tomato, piles of pickles, heads of lettuce, pounds of processed deli meats, mountains of kale, all held together with plastic picks the size of the Excalibur, such a sandwich must be found to be in violation of The Hot Dog Rule. If you have to break your sandwich down into all its component parts as though you’re rebuilding an automobile transmission before you can think about managing a bite, such a sandwich must be found to be in violation of The Hot Dog Rule.

I admit, there are gray areas. For one thing, there is the matter of spillage. But to be perfectly honest, a snippet or two of diced onion or a soupçon of relish falling overboard is hardly the same thing as needing a forceps to pry your jaw open wide enough to take a bite of a sandwich the size of a MINI Cooper.

As for chili dogs, I’m going to have to plead the fifth.