Portillo’s Hot Dogs

Posted by Edmund in Chicago, Fast Food, Featured Articles, Restaurants | 0 comments

Dec 15, 10

Cuisine: Fast Food.
Specialty: Hot Dog.
Location: All throughout Illinois.
Price: $2.29-$3.45 for the Hot Dogs.

There’s nothing quite so American as a good hot dog. Simple, fast, and delicious, it’s perfect for the throngs of people rushing around in cosmopolitan areas.

When I got into Chicago, then, I was really looking forward to trying some of the legendary dogs. While you can get a decent hot dog anywhere, I’d heard that no place does it quite like Chicago.

So I asked around to find where the locals go to for their hot dogs. One of the few places that kept on popping up was a local chain, Portillo’s, which has been serving up hot dogs since 1963. Normally, I’m not a fan of fast food, but a hot dog is so simple that it’s almost impossible to get wrong—or so I thought.

Regardless, I headed over to one of Portillo’s several locations, expecting a pretty decent hot dog. I ordered up a beef hot dog with everything, a Polish dog, and some cheese fries, a pretty decent representation of the whole menu.

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I’ll start off with the traditional Chicago dog with the works: relish, onions, and mustard. The hot dog isn’t bad, but it really doesn’t strike me as anything noteworthy. The beef is extremely juicy and succulent, so that you can see the juice/oil come out as you bite it. You also get a nice crack as you bite into the casing. It’s not heavy, not too oily, and not too big to overshadow the other ingredients.

As for those ingredients, they are also pretty good, but they’re really just some relish, onions, and mustard, and they taste just like something that’s been bought from the store. Don’t get me wrong. The combo is good. The beef is very well-cooked, the relish adds a great slight sweetness that’s balanced by the equally nice tangy mustard, and no flavor comes off as too strong. But it seems like it’s just a really well-cooked hot dog, with nothing special about it. One thing I really didn’t like—and this is the reason the hot dog doesn’t get a higher score—is the bread, which was so small it could barely hold the ingredients and couldn’t even fit the pickle. Score: 2.5/5.0.

The Polish dog, packed with Polish sausage, grilled onions, and cheese, fares just a bit better, though it too suffers from some fundamental mistakes that hold it back from greatness. First, while the meat is extremely succulent, it is a bit overcooked with a burnt/overly blackened layer on one side. I like my hot dogs smoky, but this one overdid it a bit. Second—and this time it’s a much larger problem—the bread fails yet again. The sausage is too thick and the onions too stacked for the bread to really hold everything. Even though there are only 2 main ingredients in this hot dog (the dog and the onions), I found that just about all the onions fall off. Third, I do like the idea of the onions, which could add a nice, slight oiliness and some flavor to the somewhat underspiced Polish sausage (it’s very mild). Unfortunately, those onions are just slathered in oil so that all you taste is some extra greasiness. Finally, the cheese is drizzled on so little that you barely taste it, although, considering that it’s whiz cheese—and a very dull one at that—that might be for the best. Still, the idea and overall taste is much more flavorful than the first, largely because of the succulent sausage, which is, yet again, the best part of the meal. Score: 2.7/5.0.

The biggest disappointment, though, is by far the cheese fries, which are actually just some plain fries with a side of whiz cheese. They are, in a word, simply horrible. The cheese has that really artificial taste you get from movie theater cheddar cheese, which makes it absolutely unsatisfactory. It doesn’t even have much spice, which is the main draw to nacho cheese, and instead it just comes off as gratuitously greasy and oily. The fries themselves fare a lot better. They’re medium-sized, but very crispy, with those nice ridges that homemade fries often have. Regardless, they’re way, way too salty, becoming downright cloying. Moreover, they’re often mushy on the inside, meaning they’re not cooked well. Overall, a failure. Score: 0.8/5.0.

Nor do I find Portillo’s to be all that good of a deal. For all this food, I ended up paying about $10, a rather fair price for fast food. Still, the quality just wasn’t there to distinguish this in any way from any other average fast food joint.

Portillo’s, then, really is just normal, boring fast food. I came expecting one of the best hot dogs in the city, i.e. something worthy of the name “Chicago dog.” Portillo’s, though, didn’t deliver at all, regardless of how popular it may be with locals in search of a quick meal.

And so my search for a true Chicago dog continues.

Scores
Taste: 2.0/5.0
Value: 2.0/5.0. Very cheap, but also very low quality.
Verdict: 2.0/5.0