The Bucket List The Wiener's Circle

The Wiener’s Circle (2622 N. Clark St., 773-447-7444) is inconveniently located in a congested stretch of Lincoln Park with only 10 parking spots, has no bathroom, is cash-only, and was temporarily shut down late last year for health-code violations, but it has one thing going for it: It’s a fucking madhouse. Any self-respecting Chicagoan has heard about the hot dog stand’s infamous weekend night shifts running until 5 a.m., when the stumbling drunks can get in from the cold and order with language as salty as the cheddar fries while the staff retaliates in kind; but I hadn’t paid the restaurant a drunken late-night visit until a few weekends ago.

Now, you could make the argument that a city isn’t truly a city until it’s spawned a cottage industry of restaurants that intentionally and winkingly abuse their customers with crappy service and plenty of sass. But despite my lifelong love of hot dogs and vow to one day get a tattoo of a Chicago-style dog, I’ve always been nonplussed with The Wiener’s Circle's racially tinged twist: The cashiers, cooks, and entire staff are all black, while the belligerent customers tend to be suburban white kids or college kids working out their racist tendencies. Besides, this city offers plenty of rudeness whenever you aren’t looking for it, and for free. 

But The Wiener’s Circle has two distinct personalities: During the day, it’s a casual restaurant with inviting red picnic tables outside, and the staff will politely serve you some cheap hot dogs and burgers as if it were just another restaurant; at night, WC transforms into a cage of yelling Caucasians ruled only by chaos—you’ll have to shout over a pack of ravenous customers just to determine whether someone is in line, and then yell your order even louder to the rowdy staff behind the counter. YouTube is lousy with slyly shot videos of customers being dressed down. One of my favorites is a guy intentionally provoking them for a solid four minutes, ordering like a character from Frasier and asking for gruyere cheese before paying in change:

Before embarking on this adventure, everyone was telling me that the food also gets better at nightfall. Based on the WC hot dog provided to all attendees at a John Hodgman signing at Borders a few years ago, that wasn't hard to believe. The dog was mushy, the toppings a mess, and the relish an ominous shade of radioactive green. Hodgman himself complained about their quality, and mocked Chicago’s obsession with dragging our hot dogs through “some kind of disgusting garden.” This may have been a man who denied our city even existed, but I couldn’t disagree with his assessment of The Wiener's Circle's food. But that was during a weekend afternoon. To find out what The Wiener’s Circle is all about, I had to go there in the middle of the night, and apparently I had to go after a couple of drinks.

First, I have to properly frame the strange events of this particular night so you can understand my unusually increased tolerance for rudeness: South Loop brunch place The Bongo Room (1152 S. Wabash Ave., 312-291-0100) played fast and loose with its expected waiting time before essentially kicking my party out for opting to wait for our table near the door instead of the designated coffee bar/waiting area; I got into a pair of heated verbal altercations at a They Might Be Giants show with a group of drunks shouting over the entire concert; and I had an unexpected run-in with Vanilla Ice at Clark and Belmont, which should have been uncomfortable but wasn’t (his publicist was inexplicably miffed by my flattering interview with him over the summer—“we thought you were on Ice’s side” read one e-mail I got). To prove there were no hard feelings, Ice gave me a fist bump and sent me on my way.

Nice, nice best friends forever?Kelly Reilly

The video above shows how playful the staff’s sass can be, but it wasn’t like that at all when I entered at 1 a.m. The pungent aroma of french fries sliced through the icy air during the first cold snap of the season, and nobody was outside the restaurant. Hell, nobody was outside, period. Inside, though, The Wiener’s Circle was as packed as a campus-area phone booth from a bygone era, but it was pretty quiet. Had I come on the wrong night? Was I too early?

Those concerns proved short-lived, because that’s exactly when the yelling started. “I want a fucking hot dog!” shouted one man at no one in particular under the harsh lighting. He might’ve been yelling at this friend to buy him some food, but it was tough to tell because he got cut off by another gentleman navigating his way through an order. “Do you take a fucking credit card? You wait ‘til I get this money. I want a fucking hot dog—only ketchup! Four fucking dollars? Jesus Christ!” Meanwhile, a faltering girl in a red coat tried to make her way through the crowd holding a pool of ketchup on some napkins, while another guy attempted to mop up the pool of ketchup on the sleeve of his Abercrombie sweatshirt.

Jesus Christ, indeed. They’ve somehow figured out how to put all of Wrigleyville in an entire room. The place smelled of cigarettes. The place smelled of vomit. The place smelled, well, of drunks. Drunks that love to dish out abuse as much as they love to be abused, and it was my turn to order. Despite wearing a turtleneck, glasses I don’t need, and a sports jacket, I wasn’t hassled at all. I yelped my order to the ladies and within three minutes got it—and the legend about the food improving at night wasn’t exactly true.

The fries were crisp but lacked character—you could only taste that they’d been fried more than anything resembling flavor. Fortunately, the dog tasted somewhat better than it had years before during the day. There was a noticeable snap in the char dog, the toppings were fresh, but the goop claiming to be cheese looked and smelled like it was hatched out of a Silly Putty egg. 

This cheese can be used to stucco ceilings.biskuit

But The Wiener’s Circle isn’t about eating; it’s about the experience. After hearing the same drunk shout that his hot dogs tasted like shit and the same cashier shoot back that his dick tasted like shit before calling for the “next bitch in line,” the mayhem began to seem a bit familiar. This American Life has already done a great job of portraying the creepy racism that this place unleashes, so I won’t bother detailing that here. Although a group of 12-year-olds entering at 1:30 a.m. made the interactions a little more interesting (a large group’s attempts to buy a "chocolate shake," a.k.a. a full-chested flash from one of the cashiers, was amusingly rejected with the explanation, “If I flash you, I can go to jail for being a sex offender!”), you can only watch the one-sided abuse for so long before growing tired of it. My attempts to spark a conversation with any of the drunks inside proved futile, as they’d eventually zone out and just focus all their energy on chewing.

biskuit

Dejected, I shoved open the doors and made my way outside. Before bidding The Wiener’s Circle goodnight, I approached a table of twentysomethings from Ohio to find out if maybe I had done something wrong. They quickly became my new best friends, and I earned a newfound respect for this place. The Wiener’s Circle isn’t about the food, or even about the casual racism: It’s about meeting people. “I yelled at this lady, and it made it taste that much better,” one guy told me. “In order to have the deliciousness, you have to have the attitude.”

On the other hand, a woman with them said that the staff’s reactions are totally random—you can go about your business and just order and they’ll be amenable, or you can yell at them and they might ignore you. The loudest people unquestionably earn the harshest heckle, no matter how hackneyed but foulmouthed it might be. We talked for a good 20 minutes, complete strangers whose only bond was having the same greasy grub in our guts. Maybe the barbs yelled by the white customers are unsettling, but their theory is that hot dogs and hamburgers correspond to this type of behavior more than any other cuisine: “We went to an Indian restaurant this morning. [Can you imagine] if we had gone there and they had been like, ‘You want chicken marsala, you American motherfucker?'”

Maybe so, though it’s a safe bet that most servers are thinking this in their heads when we politely or impolitely place our very specific orders. The Wiener’s Circle is the only place gutsy enough to strip away social norms and just let people act like fucking lunatics. So, for that, I am willing to take a page from Vanilla Ice’s book and not hold a grudge against The Wiener’s Circle and go back some time. 

More new best friends, brought together by the Wiener's Circle.Kelly Reilly