This summer Guinness World Records crowned the Juuni Ban from Seattle’s Tokyo Dog food truck the world’s most expensive hotdog. A 12-inch smoked cheese bratwurst served with butter teriyaki grilled onions, maitake mushrooms, wagyu beef (made from the same cattle breed that produces Japan’s Kobe beef), foie gras, shaved black truffles, caviar, and Japanese mayo on a brioche bun, selling for $169 a piece and requiring two weeks’ notice to order, it usurped the California Capital City Dawg of Sacremento, itself an 18-inch monstrosity topped with whole-grain mustard, garlic, herb mayo, sautéed shallots, mixed baby greens, applewood- and cherry-smoked uncured bacon, Swedish moose cheese, chopped tomatoes, sweetened dried cranberries, basil olive oil, cranberry-pear-coconut balsamic vinaigrette, and fresh ground pepper on a herb focaccia roll toasted in white truffle butter, which sold for $145.49 a pop. Both were truly impressive hotdogs, miles above a Hebrew National with yellow mustard on a white bread bun. But despite the Guinness acclaim, the Juuni Ban is not the most expensive hotdog ever created or sold. It’s just one iteration of a recent and perversely delightful trend of frivolous foodies trying to transform classic American junk foods into hyper-expensive haute cuisine.
The world’s most expensive hotdog was probably New York’s 230 Fifth’s $2300 hot dog monstrosity of 60-day dry-aged wagyu beef, Vidalia onions caramelized in Dom Perignon champagne, sauerkraut braised in Cristal, and caviar, served up in 2012. The hotdog lacks Guinness certification because of the award’s shocking rigorous standards and vetting process, which takes up to a year to complete and requires verification that at least one of the creations is purchased in a legitimate business transaction. Many restaurants, especially those like 230 Fifth, serving an impressive creation for a limited engagement don’t want to bother with the time and energy of Guinness certification. But the 230 Fifth hotdog’s far from one short-lived, extreme outlier beating out the Juuni Ban. It’s just one of a progression of unofficial expensive hotdogs that’ve sprung up in sequence over the past half-decade across the nation.
Back in 2010, the most expensive hotdog on offer may have been Serendipity 3’s $69 Haute Dog, a Guinness-recognized 12-inch beef sausage grilled in white truffle oil served with duck foie gras, black truffle, and caramelized Vidalia onions on a pretzel roll. The Haute Dog was surpassed just the next year by a vendor at the baseball stadium in Brockton, MA, who prepared an $80 12-inch hotdog rubbed in truffle oil and rolled in porcini dust, topped with crème fraiche and truffles. Then in 2012, DougieDog in Vancouver, Canada, introduced the $98.68 Dragon Dog, a Kobe beef bratwurst seared in olive and truffle oil, infused with 100-year-old Louis XIII cognac, and topped with fresh lobster and a secret picante sauce. And in within the same year, the hotdog game made a quantum leap towards theONEdog, Little Rock, AR, hot dog cart man Mike Juiliano’s $1501 brat served with lobster tail and gold flake.
Hot dog’s aren’t the only common foods getting gussied up these days. At Steveston Pizza in Richmond, Canada, you can get a $725 tiger prawn, lobster ratatouille, smoked steelhead, Russian Osetra caviar, and Italian white truffle pie. Over in Toronto, the chefs at Le Dolci recently created an $822.56 cupcake made with Krug Collection Brut Champagne, Normandy buttercream frosting, 70 percent dark cacao from the Amedei chocolatiers of Tuscany, specialty coffee, French sea salt, organic cane sugar, Tahitian vanilla beans, gold flakes, sugar diamonds, edible gold fondant flora and fauna, and champagne caviar bubbles, topped with 21-year-old Courvoisier cognac. And, showing everyone up once more, Serendipity 3’s also done a $1,000 Golden Opulence ice cream sundae with 3 scoops of Tahitian vanilla ice cream, 23-karat edible gold leaf, and caviar in a Baccarat Harcourt goblet, eaten with an 18-karat gold spoon.
In every case, the goal of the chefs involved seems to be to take classical, cheap American dishes and fancy them up with expensive ingredients. Especially in the case of the hot dog, this feels unholy. A quintessential product of immigration introduced to the States around the 1860s by industrious German migrants, the original hot dog vendors made a name for themselves by underselling each other, cutting prices to serve something cheap, easy, and still appealing (thanks to the skill of grillers and the power of condiments) across class lines—something like a truly democratic food. That’s actually the legacy of hot dogs across the world, like in Iceland where Reykjavik’s Bæjarins Beztu Pylsur hot dog stand remains one of the country’s favorite eateries, serving lamb-made brats for $5 to $10 a piece. Chefs like those at 230 Fifth try to justify their elitist abominations by donating the proceeds to charity, claiming that selling just one $2300 hot dog could feed 9,200. But even that feels strangely perverse.
Granted, some of these hotdogs, sundaes, and pizzas are made with best intentions. But the egregious use of champagne, caviar, and truffles throughout points unequivocally to opulence for opulence’s sake. The folks at 666 Burger in New York summed up the trend perfectly when they announced their comic $666 Douche Burger, which they billed as “filled and topped with rich people shit”—Kobe beef, gold leaf, foie gras, caviar, lobster, truffles, imported aged gruyere cheese melted with champagne steam, kopi luwak BBQ sauce, and Himalayan rock salt—wrapped in three $100 bills so that “when you are done with it you’ll have three greasy hundred dollar bills and have to decide what to do with them. That’s why it is called the Douche Burger.” The description’s funny, egregious, and twisted all at once, just like the strange 21st century trend it embodies. Thankfully, 2012’s $2300 hot dog seems to be the cap for now, but who knows what strange new hyper-expensive ingredient they’ll think to add to the classic stadium brat next.
