I kind of think it’s not just that restaurants can customize burgers, or that they’re considered lower quality, but rather that there’s a perception that you’re not getting your money’s worth. At least that’s what I always figure when I see a hot dog on the menu somewhere like Five Guys. The assumption is that they’re just heating up some readily available brand of hot dogs (the vast majority of which are precooked) and putting toppings on them, which is something you can do at home very easily, while hamburgers require a little more effort and preparation, and there are significant differences between raw materials.
I mean, if I want a Hebrew National hot dog, I’ll buy a package and make my own, rather than pay someone 3x the price to make one for me.
That was my first thought. Hot dogs are open topped and stuff has more of a tendency to spill out.
There’s a butcher shop near here that sells freshly made & cooked hot dogs during the summer and they are delicious. They’re also a lot harder to eat in the car than a cheeseburger if you don’t want to risk wearing a bunch of mustard-covered onion bits. Burgers just strike me as more convenient.
Good catch; QSR Magazine lists DQ in a separate segment (snack restaurants, rather than burger restaurants). Though they have 4400+ locations, I don’t know how many of those are “Brazier” restaurants (i.e., they serve hot food as well as ice cream desserts).
I think the fundamental difference is that hot dogs are easier to make than hamburgers, and that goes both ways. At home, hot dogs are likely more popular, as well as in street carts and concession stands, for that reason. But people aren’t interested in getting a dog from a regular restaurant, precisely because it’s something they can easily get at home.
To me hotdogs have a specific taste that is good, but it’s more of a once in a while good not a casual food good. Burgers have that everyday satisfaction. In that hotdogs are more of a delicacy or specialty item while burgers are that down home goodness. Both are part of a well balanced diet. I do suspect it is not because of marketing or availability but because of the flavor that causes this natural divide.
I think that this is a big part of it. A hot dog is viewed as a snack food. You grab it off a food cart on the street, or a counter stand, or at the ball park. It’s in the same category as soft pretzels, or peanuts, or ice cream cones. If you accompany it with anything it’s potato chips or a knish, not fries. You wouldn’t go to a sit-down restaurant to eat one.
Burgers are more apt to be regarded as a full meal, for lunch or even dinner. While you can pick them up at the drive-thru window, people are more likely to eat them as a sit-down meal.
bump, the hot dogs at Five Guys are awesome. I prefer them over their cheeseburgers.
However, I do face a dilemma. One is just a snack but two make me uncomfortably full if I get them with fries, which of course I always do.
I kind of think this is why they aren’t more pravalent. At the very least, there is a perception that one hot dog isn’t going to be very filling. You could get two, but then you’d be the big ole pig eating two hot dogs, burping hot dog burps all night long.
I am going to throw out another hypothesis: hot dogs are low effort kiddie food. They are the kind of food you fix for the children when you don’t feel like cooking. Growing up I ate a million hotdogs on sandwich bread with potato chips as the side dish. Cheeseburgers were also on the rotation (also on sandwich bread), but they not as frequently as hot dogs.
It’s hard to make hot dogs. You need special equipment to turn meat and fat into a smooth paste. If you get the proportions wrong, or you don’t grind it finely enough, or you don’t mix it thoroughly, the fat will separate and you’ll get a disgusting mess. It’s easy to overheat the mixture during the grinding process, so it’s common to add ice in the right amount to keep it cool without getting too much water in the product. Also, you need to mix in nitrites or nitrates, and again, this must be done thoroughly and in the right proportion. You also need to stuff the mixture into casings (even skinless franks are stuffed into casings which are removed later). The initial cooking must be done carefully to prevent the fat from melting away.
In short, it’s so much work and so specialized that most restaurants are better off buying pre-made hot dogs than making their own.
Going a bit off topic, there is a butcher shop in my neighborhood that makes their own sausages. I would assume as a butcher shop they would have the ability to make hot dogs if they choose to, hot dogs basically being just a different type of sausage. But they don’t. I assume the reason is what you say, people don’t think of hot dogs as a gourmet item and they aren’t something most people would go to a fancy butcher shop to buy. They probably rightly assume their scraps of pork are better put to use in bratwurst, Italian sausage, chorizo, etc.
Emulsified sausages are much harder to make than other sausages. The process is more involved and easier to screw up, as I outlined above.
Does your butcher shop make other types of emulsified sausages, like bockwurst and mortadella? If so, I’d say they’ve decided they don’t have much of a market for house-made hot dogs. If not, it’s probably because it’s too hard and too expensive for them to make these types of sausages.
I’ve never had a hot dog at Nathan’s without fries. Our youngest doesn’t really like hot dogs, although he will eat them at Nathan’s (Coney Island location only). There’s a higher end burger joint near us that also has hot dogs, and I probably opt for one a third of the time we eat there.
Yeah, here in Chicago, fries are often expected to come with hot dogs. It’s changed a little bit in the last decade or two, but growing up in the 80s, a hot dog order at a hot dog stand always included fries. And there still are plenty of places that include it whether you ask for it or not.
