My local barbecue place makes hot dogs. I’ve never had one, but they’ve been on the menu for a while, so they’re probably not too bad. https://thepigrestaurant.com/our-meats/
Being in NC, they probably come with slaw. That just ain’t right. I’ll only eat that stuff on a bbq sandwich.
For all its lagging, it’s still the second most favorite sandwich in America. My guess is that restaurants generally find hot dogs less cost-effective. I’m sure gourmet hot dogs exist, but I’d never pay more than three bucks for one, whereas a Kobe beef burger with, I dunno, caviar-flecked lobster morsels can go to $80 or higher, and there are plenty of $12 burger specials at TGI Fridays-type establishments.
I would be more willing to pay someone for making and serving a hamburger than for boiling a hot dog and handing it to me on a bun.
We used to have at least one “gourmet” hot dog place in Chicago, called Hot Doug’s. It was very popular, but it closed back in 2014.
The best way to have a hot dog isn’t on a bun at all. It’s on a garbage plate.
Oh yes, we here in Upstate NY are proud of our snappy franks and white coneys. Garbage plates , a slew of different kinds, are sold at a popular downtown restaurant, many combinations of food…Before food trucks became a thing in the last few years, in the 70’s and 80’s there was a hot dog cart on every street corner downtown. That’s all there was. One guy tried cooking and selling hamburgers, but it was impractical and took way too long. Because so many hot dogs were out there for sale, a quick, inexpensive lunch, some restaurants thought we were all just totally enamored with hot dogs as a delicious treat! Two of them started advertising ‘buy your hot dog here at our restaurant, here or to go!’…uh, no, when you were running all over on your lunch break doing stuff, you didn’t have time to go in a sitdown restaurant, you grabbed a hot dog from one of the carts and ate it on the way back to work. Now food trucks with really great food have displaced, too late for me, the ubiquitous tube steak peddlers…that’s all I got for hot dog stories, except there is a French-Asian cafe here that sells cookies, slices of cake, bubble tea, and pastries, and there are always a couple of elaborate croissant-dough looking things with slices of frankfurters in them, like ornaments on a Christmas tree. I don’t know if it’s a French or Asian thing, but I’ve seen variations , always something involving split or sliced hot dogs.
They can, but why? Nobody thinks of them as being something gourmet, even when they are.
These guys used to have an actual restaurant location and a truck, but it folded. Their actual hot dogs are stupendous, and they used freshly baked buns too.
But at the end of the day, they’re still a gussied-up hot dog and the 80/20 rule still applies- if these hot dogs are at like 98%, an Oscar Mayer from the microwave with French’s mustard and whatever toppings are in the fridge is still 80%.
The fact that the big fast food chains originally were hamburger places and not hot dogs seems to be a big factor, and once they got established as the ‘standard fast food’ item hot dogs were just an afterthought. The fact that burgers just use ground beef instead of a sausage was something I hadn’t thought of. I figured ‘just buy bunch of hot dogs’ would be easy, but like people have pointed out that ties you to a specific supplier, and making your own is much harder than making your own patties. It also cuts into your ability to be perceived as higher quality or gourmet, since you’re just using the same off-the-shelf tube meat everyone else is.
I don’t think it’s as hard to fit gourmet toppings as people are thinking, since you can actually put quite a lot into a hot dog bun, and could easily use a bigger bun if you wanted to do more over-the-top dogs. I think the lack of gourmet ties back more to either needing to make your own or being perceived as ‘slapping fancy stuff on a grocery store dog’.
The size issue used to apply to hamburgers too - the original McDonald’s burger was the little 1/8 pound thing that isn’t really a full meal, and older stories reference eating ‘a couple of hamburgers’ pretty routinely. Over time they morphed into the larger burgers we usually see today (1/4 pound is on the small side for a ‘meal’ hamburger). I think issues of size or being seen as a snack food are secondary effects from not catching on as a fast food item in the first place.
Definitely an interesting little thing to think about!
One word…Brats.
Slaw is optional. You can get them with pimento cheese. 
I think this is one of the main reasons. Also, hot dog buns suck.
Chileans have “Italiano”, with mashed avocado, mayo, and dices tomatoes. The “Completo” adds chucrut and pickles.
Here in Peru they aren’t that popular, you see them in kids’ birthdays and the easy no-prep lunchbox food. We imported the choripán from Argentina, with “pan francés” or ciabatta and instead of Viennese or similar, we use chorizo (coarser grind and much thicker, pork in Peru, beef in Argentina) butterfly cut, usually with yellow mustard, mayo and/or ketchup. This flatter version is much easier to eat.
Our chorizo is nothing like Spanish chorizo, by the way.
For some years I worked at Fair St. Louis, the big July 4th celebration. I was surprised that bratwurst constantly outsold hot dogs. One of the food service people said, “It’s simple. Adults eat brats, kids eat hot dogs.”
when it’s grilling weather, we like to cook brats or sausages
Wow! Pink’s is still there? Has Tail O’ the Pup ever been resurrected?
Less variety of toppings. Blue cheese, mushrooms, avocado, artichokes, fried egg, etc. taste better on hamburgers than on hot dogs (YMMV).
When they do it’s friggin’ awesome. My local gourmet hot dog place – Super Duper Weenie – makes insanely good hot dogs from scratch. (Technically it’s a 30-minute drive from my home, but close enough that I try to go at least a couple times a year.)
My area also has a hot-dog-first place called Swanky Franks, but I almost never went there because Super Duper Weenie exists. Sadly, in googling to remember the name “Swanky Franks” I found this article from 2017: Swanky Franks closes after 60 years. Ouch.
Here in Tucson Sonoran style hotdogs have become very popular and there are outdoor vendors usually with one of two little tables to sit at all over the place.
Every restaurant I’ve worked at that served lunch offered hot dogs but they were rarely ordered and unpopular. It was basically a fall back option for kids along with stuff like grilled cheese. Burgers probably weren’t any more popular than club sandwiches or crab cakes, though.