The Spot Dogs It Once Again

It's a good sign when you order a hot dog and they bring you a steak knife.

Unfortunately, when this happened to me last night at The Spot in Uptown, it was not a harbinger of the meal to come.

The Spot is not one of my favorite places. It's stuffy, it's laid out poorly for people flow, and management packs in as many people as it can for an unending range of events. The idea is to offer something for everyone; the effect is to pander to any customer base with a few bucks in its collective back pocket.

I was obligated to go on Saturday night for Gigfest, a charity fund-raiser organized by a good friend of mine. While I was there, I stumbled upon a menu offering called The Ultimate Monster White Trash Hot Dog (or something like that) -- a dog, stuffed with cheese, wrapped in bacon, deep-fried, dipped in beer batter and deep-fried again, then served on a bed of french fries.

There's nothing in that list that's unappealing to me. Taken together, though, it's actually not quite as good as it sounds for several reasons:

-- First of all, the whole thing needed to be smothered in chili.

-- Second, all the deep-frying washed out the bacon, reducing it to a pasty goo that clung like pig-fat boogers to both the dog and my teeth. It's a shame, too, because the couple of bacon bits that fell off and were eaten separately were very tasty, but that flavor never came through in the dog. Perhaps the bacon should have been added in between the deep-frying cycles.

-- Third, it wasn't served on a bun. A fresh S. Rosen piece would have tied everything together nicely, and would have made it easier to eat. (They really did give me a steak knife, but trying to cut through deep-fried batter just makes it crumble everywhere. I ended up eating the whole thing with my hands, which should probably surprise no one after I've admitted to eating this thing in any way, shape or form.) Despite the mental image the description might conjure up, the white trash dog was nowhere near too large to fit on a bun, and if you're going to serve it on top of fries anyway that's all the more reason to drench it in chili.

All things considered, this dog was a lot of great tastes that didn't quite taste great together. It was OK, but like everything else about The Spot, was perhaps a bit over-sold.