Tasteless relish and gentile pickles. Next time I’ll try the Italian beef.

Last Sunday I wrote about our ongoing quest for a genuine Chicago-style hot dog — or at least what might be considered a reasonable facsimile — anywhere the Dallas metro area. Our options, to put it mildly, have been slim. According to a number of local food bloggers and critics the best Chicago-style hot dogs can be purchased at Five Guys, The Dog Stop and Wild About Harry’s, although the latter is located on Knox Street in a snooty and ridiculous congested neighborhood that’s not worth the trouble. We tried the hot dogs at Five Guys last weekend (see post).

So, a couple of hours ago Sam and I drove to The Dog Spot, a teeny little drive-up hut in north Dallas (see above), and bought ourselves four Chicago-style hot dogs that we shlepped back to Mesquite for dinner. They looked picture-perfect but were otherwise underwhelming as the dogs had no “snap” and definitely weren’t Kosher, they forgot to use celery salt, the relish was tasteless and the pickle spear was disappointingly gentile. On a scale from 1 to 10, these were maybe a 5. (Even Five Guys’ was better.) Next I’ll try the Italian beef.

As long as I’m reminiscing about food from Chicago this might be an excellent opportunity to mention Barnaby’s, a north suburban restaurant that first opened in 1969 during my last year of high school and became a favorite hangout for my crowd of friends. Barnaby’s is still in business — which I didn’t realize until a few minutes ago — and still winning pizza awards. Inside it looked like an English pub with hardwood booths, huge iron chandeliers and stained glass portraits of wenches and medieval dudes. In addition to pizza and sandwiches you could also get big pitchers of really good root beer. I’m actually hungry enough to drive to Chicago RIGHT NOW except there’s a thunderstorm moving in and Sam is outside on the patio enjoying the light show.

Doing anything fun tonight? As soon as it starts to rain (any minute now) and Sam comes back inside we’re planning to watch Support Your Local Sheriff with James Garner and Jack Elam, as illustrated by the photo below. (Bruce Dern is the bearded character in the window.) Support Your Local Sheriff is one of the funniest western parodies EVER and well worth watching if you’ve never seen it. Afterwards Sam and I have a few more Three Stooges episodes to see because we’re connoisseurs of highbrow comedy and dialog. (Please get that expression off your face.)

I think I’ll scrounge around for something to eat — maybe gefilte fish! — and bake a batch of Pillsbury sugar-free brownies if I can remember where I put the last box. Thank you for reading this and say hi to the family for me, okay?