On Hot Doug's

On a rainy, late-September Wednesday at about 1:00 pm, on the corner of Roscoe and California in the Avondale neighborhood of Chicago, a familiar sight goes unseen. As opposed to the normal mass of people stretching almost a block down Roscoe, the Hot Doug's line extends only to the door on the inside. Where one would typically have to wait an hour or more, on this day it only takes about ten minutes to get up to the counter.

As always, the order is taken by Doug Sohn, an affable Jewish man in his late forties whose face bears slight stubble and black and orange thick rimmed glasses. "You got it!" Sohn, whose establishment embodies so much more of his likeness than just his name, exclaims enthusiastically with every order, consciously ensuring that each customer feels uniquely welcome and appreciated. Every detail of the Hot Doug's experience, from ordering to the menu to the ambiance, is directly crafted from Sohn's personality and vision. One wall reads "There are no two finer words in the English language than 'encased meats,' my friend" in big block letters, attributing the quote to Secret Robbie. Another is a shrine to Elvis Presley. The restaurant has become a Chicago institution of which Sohn is steadfast and stubborn in preserving the sanctity.
The menu features a set selection of 11 hot dogs and sausages ranging from The Dog, a typical Chicago style hot dog with all the trimmings, to the Norm Crosby, a Thuringer sausage made from beef, pork, and garlic. Additionally, there is a specials board with about 10-12 specialty sausages. The board, with the exception of a foie gras duck sausage that has a constant presence, features about 12 exotic sausages and is staggered such that it completely turns over every two weeks. On this day, specials include a bacon cheeseburger beef sausage with Coca Cola BBQ sauce and maple cheddar cheese, a spicy BLT bacon-jalapeño sausage with avocado cream, iceberg lettuce, cherry tomatoes, and asiago cheese, and a ginger spiked rabbit sausage with red pepper mayonnaise and creme de brie cheese.

Hot Doug's serves its famous duck fat french fries on Fridays and Saturdays. While its main menu is certainly delicious, its items can be replicated in other kitchens. The flavors and ingredients of the specials, however, differentiate Hot Doug's from almost everywhere else in the world. The normal menu ranges in price from $2-4 per order and the special sausages are $6-10. It is the type of place where you extend yourself both monetarily and calorically because you don't know when the next time will be that you will be able to carve out a few hours for lunch on a weekday or Saturday and soak up the experience.

Using an independent middleman as a runner for fresh supplies from the downtown Chicago markets, Sohn sources ingredients from about 20 different suppliers and has now attained a status where purveyors of specialty sausages and cheeses reach out to him directly with samples. "The things that require less and less work on my end, I like more and more," Sohn laughs.

In the nearly 11 years since starting Hot Doug's, Sohn has been at the counter taking orders every day it has been open. "I know that people are making a concerted effort to come to Hot Doug's. It's not like 'Oh I'm shopping on Michigan Avenue and I'm hungry,'" Sohn says. "It seems the right thing to do." Carefully distinguishing that he is not necessarily comparing himself to celebrity chefs, he adds, "I think the person whose name is on the restaurant should be there."

Sohn worries that the quality and brand that he has worked so carefully to build and maintain could be compromised if Hot Doug's was open for days or even hours that he is not there to oversee the operations, stating, "An owner sees things differently than the employee. I'm not blaming or criticizing the employee. It's just sort of the nature of the position. An employee is looking at something differently than I am."

In addition to the potential quality control issues that could arise, Sohn just doesn't want the responsibility: "I'd have to be in charge of people. I don't want to be in charge of people. If the deep fryer breaks, I get another deep fryer. The deep fryer doesn't take money out of the drawer. The deep fryer doesn't say the wrong thing to the customer that you've gotta then clean up. And I don't want that call at 10:30 at night, or even 6:30 at night, 'Hey, the manager didn't show up–or quit–what do we do?'" There are eight employees at Hot Doug's–four full-time line workers and four part-time servers who rotate in shifts of two at a time.

This is not to say that Sohn is a workaholic slaving through 100-hour weeks with no respite like Gus Koutroulakis, the late proprietor of Pete's Famous in Birmingham who was recently profiled by Grantland's Wright Thompon; Hot Doug's is open from 10:30 AM – 4:00 PM Monday through Saturday and closes about six weeks per year. Sometimes these vacations come at predictable times such as the 4th of July or during Christmas. Others are less standard, like the October 3rd-13th closing this year: "Christopher Columbus discovers America and gets a one-day holiday. Chris Columbus directs Adventures in Babysitting and gets nothing?? That's crazy talk!! THEREFORE . . . HOT DOUG'S WILL BE CLOSED FOR COLUMBUS'S DAYS," HotDougs.com warns.

These hours and vacations enable Sohn to reconcile what he says are his biggest challenges: not becoming bored, keeping up enthusiasm, and striving to continually improve–but at the very least maintain–the consistency and quality in the totality of the customer experience "It gets a little bit harder every day. It's a physically and mentally demanding job," Sohn says. "It's easier to keep up the enthusiasm when people keep showing up and seem to really like it. The business doesn't run by itself."

When Hot Doug's first opened at its original location in Roscoe Village in 2001 (it moved to its current spot in 2004 after a fire caused an eight month closure and relocation), there were a lot of people who doubted that Sohn's vision would be able to survive in its format of limiting the menu to hot dogs and sausages. "My brother told me, don't you think you'll have to sell hamburgers?" Sohn laughs, adding, "I have it on very good authority that the people at Vienna gave me a few months. They came in and they were like, 'Well, this isn't gonna last.'" Sohn stubbornly and steadfastly stuck to his vision, though, his rationale being that he didn't necessarily want or need to appeal to everybody: "I don't need to capture the population of Chicago. I need to capture .001%. My feeling was, 'I really want to go to the place. I can't be the only person who has these tastes.'"

He has greatly exceeded that .001% target; this past July 23rd Amy Winehouse died and House Speaker John Boehner had walked out of debt ceiling talks in Congress the day before. However, there had also been a flood in the Hot Doug's basement that morning and the second most prominent headline on Tribune.com was "Hot Doug's temporarily closed due to flooding." The restaurant has been covered extensively by the Chicago media and featured nationally in the New York Times and USA Today as well as on the Travel Channel's Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations.

Sohn turns down solicitations for expansion on a regular basis and has forgone multi-million dollar offers. "The part of the job that I like, I couldn't do if I had more than one, or had expanded hours, or was bigger, or franchised. That holds no interest for me. The reason to do it would be purely for the money. One of few rules that I live by is to not do things for the money," Sohn states unwaveringly, noting that he was miserable in past positions that he held because of the income. "I've got enough. I didn't go into this thinking it was a million dollar idea. I went into this thinking, 'I kind of want to go open a hot dog place and listen to my records all day.'"

Sohn pauses, searching for the precise words. The American Dream is often characterized by the hunger for more but his dream involves a more comparatively distinct balance between labor and leisure. "The goal is to create this place," Sohn continues. "I don't want a big house in the suburbs. Or nice suits. Or fancy cars...There is nothing I feel like I'm really missing. It's like, 'OK, so I can buy more stuff.' You know what? I have a nice TV, I have cookware, I have good knives. Those are the things I really need. I want to go home at the end of the day and do those things. Restaurants can be all-consuming."

With more locations, Sohn would have more responsibility–which he consistently reiterates that he does not want–and less control over the quality and consistency of the product. "If I want to own 10 of something, I don't want it to be restaurants," he says, stressing that it is special for him to preside over a restaurant that is unique as opposed to commoditized. "Then, it's not going to be Hot Doug's. It's going to be 10 cookie cutter locations. Everything would be much more computerized–because it would have to be. Then, it's different." He acknowledges, though, that he will never say never. "Eight figures, I'm not turning down. There does come a point."

Sohn is not sure how much longer he will continue operations and does not have a succession plan; for now he is taking it year by year. "I like providing lunch to people. It's cool," he laughs. "I can take 6-7 weeks vacation. I'm in control, to the extent that I can be in control." As long as Sohn keeps at it, Hot Doug's will remain a unique lunch destination for Chicago citizens and tourists alike.