The best hot dogs in Shanghai
Best of Shanghai is a new category on the site that will be updated from time to time. WARNING: This is one man’s opinion — but it’s usually right.
I broke a longstanding personal maxim over the weekend: Never utter the word “dog” while ordering at a Chinese restaurant. But at Orange Dog, a snack shop in the basement of Jiu Guang City Plaza, the big new mall on Nanjing Xi Lu next to Jing’an Temple, it’s hard not to — hot dogs are their specialty. And I’d rather eat a phallus of ground up pig snouts than poor old Rover any day. (Actually, according to the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council, hot dogs are not made of snouts and other sundry swine parts. They are made of “specially selected meat trimmings of beef and/or pork.” And I can’t think of any reason why the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council would lie about something like that. Oh, wait — yes I can.)
The best hot dogs I’ve had in China were cooked by my friend Luis at one of his famous back porch barbecues, which always include — curiously — several boxes of Kittyland cookies. Don’t tell Luis I told you this: His hot dogs usually come burned. But, in China, you take what you can get. I once ordered a hot dog in Lanzhou (I know, I know) at one of those Western knock-off restaurants where everything looks kind of Western but ends up being really weird. I got a big bun that looked even bigger because of what was inside it. It was a small Chinese sausage. You know, the reddish, kind of sweet ones. It was about the size of my middle finger, ironically. They sliced it in half length-wise and placed the two pieces end to end. Even then it didn’t fill up the bun. Making things worse, the meat was lathered in mayonnaise. Mayonnaise! Where was I? Britain?
So, I was excited to stumble upon Orange Dog, where everything looked and tasted normal.
12.07.2004, 8:07 PM · Best of Shanghai, Food · Comments (19)