The Original Hot Dog Shop, in the Oakland district of Pittsburgh, is closing. For good. After sixty years. The owner donated 35,000 pounds of potatoes to a food bank, and reportedly started selling the equipment. So no foolin’.
It was a place to get the best fries in America, in mind-boggling quantities. It was a place to meet up – “I’ll be in front of the O.” – and a place to sober up. It was a rickety old building on a corner, with a wraparound neon sign. It was there in 1990 when I first came to Pittsburgh, and it was there every time Mr. Rilch and I came back. And now it’s no more.
This is the first thing that’s really hit me hard. No one I know personally has died, nor any celeb/public figure I was especially keen on. But this…it’s not a person, it’s a landmark, a touchstone. I’m not being melodramatic when I say this is a gap that will never really be filled. It was bad enough when the Oakland Beehive (coffee house) closed and became a T-Mobile store. But that hadn’t been around nearly as long, and it was kind of a '90s thing, anyway. The O was not trendy, it was Pittsburgh.
And before any other Burghers (hi, Guin) say it, yes, we still have Primanti Brothers. Primanti’s is good, very good, I’d think they were the best if I’d never known the O, but only the O is the O. Nothing tastes like fresh-squeezed except fresh-squeezed, nothing handles like a Harley except a Harley, and no fries are like O fries except O fries.
They’ve got to come back in some capacity. Maybe a smaller building, maybe a reduced menu (skip the pizza; nobody went to the O for pizza alone), maybe in a different location, like the Strip District. But they’ve got to try again; this can’t be the end. I know I’m not the only one who feels this way.
Fresh-cut, skins-on (there was an industrial-sized potato peeler in view of the guests), fried in peanut oil, and enormous portions. Mr. Rilch and I, and probably thousands of other, would get an extra-large, and take home and reheat what we didn’t finish on-site.
I also went to CMU.
If my friends couldn’t find me, they knew to look at the O, where I would be playing pinball and eating the best hotdogs ever served, anywhere.
We will be baking sliced new potatoes tossed in olive oil and spices in the oven today to go with a… 10lb ham I bought a few weeks ago. The ham was supposed to be a back up because of the COVID stuff. My Wife wanted it out of the freezer. So, we are gonna have a lot of ham to eat for probably a month. I suspect half of it will go back in the freezer. With some ham and bean soup that we already have in there.
I’m wondering if there are any other standalone eating places, in other cities, that would get this reaction if they closed. I know Californians would be devastated if In 'n Out ceased to be, likewise Southerners if Waffle House shut down all stores. (And what would the NOAA do, in the latter case?) But those are franchises, and if they’re not coming back, a lot of things aren’t coming back.
This is really my “Stand” moment. Up till now, I’ve kept telling myself, “Open-air markets will come back. Film and TV production, and the four major leagues, will come back. Everything I miss will be back in some capacity.” But now something that means a great deal to me, for which there is no true substitute, is not coming back. This hits home: it’s our Crash of '29.
Yes In n Out is a chain but its still 100% family owned and their quality control is top notch. Ive never had a bad meal there.
For LA I would also nominate The Original Tommys https://www.originaltommys.com/ as my favorite stand type eatery although they have expanded from their original Beverly/Rampart location. And El Tepeyac http://eltepeyaccafe.com/ in Boyle Heights. The late owner would occasionally great guests with tequila shots. Its also famous for its five pound burritos.
The O fries were amazing. As to portion size, I believe a “small” was the entire fryer basket. The food was good, the atmosphere decent, but woe betide you if you ever needed to use the restrooms. Stephen King never wrote novels as scary as the trek to the ladies’ room. (Think the Oatley Tunnel scene in The Talisman.)
When I was a kid, we would drive from New Mexico to southern California for Christmas. Sometimes, we would stay overnight in Phoenix. If we did, we always had breakfast at the Big Apple. I remember the waitresses all wore western outfits and carried their order pads tucked in the front of their gun belts. Never had dinner there but the breakfast menu was huge.
Fast forward 40 years, I am taking my wife to the Mayo clinic and decide to see if we could go there. It had closed less than a year before. According to the stories online, people cried on closing day.
And those six-guns were wired in place because morons would try to grab them off us. It was a great place to be a waitress. No side work, no making stupid ice cream desserts & no tip splitting.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! This breaks my heart. “O” Fries were THE best! Ate them at least once a week when I lived in Oakland; accessible to Pitt, CMU and Point Park, filled with college students any day of the week. And you could get them with cheese, vinegar, gravy to dip! Legendary. So sad, The Original was an icon!
Interesting. I have never heard of that place, but 50 years ago I used to tell people that I thought that giving a customer unlimited fries would guarantee that people would come back just for that. Hell, potatoes are comparatively cheap and any loss would be minimal. People laughed at the idea.
I’m sure there are a few in metro Chicago. Lou Mitchell’s, Manny’s, Miller’s Pub, Gene and Jude’s. I would’ve said Berghoff’s, but they had their closure “scare”* some years back and I don’t think people would be as shocked if they closed again.
*They closed when the last of the family that owned the place wanted out of the business. However (1) as I recall, the bar and the basement cafeteria never closed, only the sit-down restaurant, and (2) the sit-down restaurant reopened after a few months.
