Recently, the Sonic near where I lived had a two-for-one foot-long Coneydog coupon. The coupon would draw me in with the enticing promise of bright-pink processed pig flesh drowned in chunky processed gravy wrapped in grease-sogged bread, and then my coneydog purchase would come with yet another two-for-one coneydog coupon, thus repeating the horrific cycle.
For those of you living in climates that discourage drive-in burger joints and are thus unfamiliar with the Sonic experience, let’s just say that it’s exactly like the culinary hybrid of junior highschool cafeterias and carnie food. At Sonic you can buy tater-tots covered in chili and liquid cheese. And you can buy a foot-long hotdog of the saltiest, greasiest, cheapest grade of pig-based processed flesh (sorry, I forgot to measure if it was actually a foot long). I learned that a full twenty-four inches of coneydog combined with a cup of icecream swirled with peanutbutter cup candies is actually more than my otherwise hardy constitution can pleasantly metabolize.
But there’s something compelling about the siren-song of coneydog hedonism. I don’t know if it’s the grease, the way the limp bun hangs wetly in your hand, or the way that a liberal slathering of both chili and liquid cheese product make this one of the few hotdogs in town that you have to eat with the provided plastic fork. It’s the Las Vegas whore of hotdogs and you have to respect it for being, if not the best at what it does, than for being the most of what it is.
Sonic Foot-Long Coneydog
Grade: B minus
Before I ever went out to the IKEA up in Roundrock, I knew only two things about it. One: everyone in town goes there to get super-cheap swedish meatballs. And two: they have fifty cent hotdogs.
Let’s consider for a moment the sort of pretention it takes for a furniture store in Texas to list the descriptions of all their products in both English and Swedish. If the store was in Minneapolis, I could maybe see that. But as it is, it’s a huge bilingual "screw you" to all the native Spanish speakers in Texas. And why keep the Swedish names for products that customers will have to remember for the 45minutes it takes to extract the product from the warehouse? How many of the Ikea Roundrock employees actually know the subtle differences in meaning between "ingo" and "malm"?
And in the face of all this Swedish chauvinism, they sell hotdogs. I have a friend in Germany who confirms that they sell hotdogs at the end of the furniture-design gauntlet there as well. Hotdogs are an intrinsically American invention. They sell sausages in northern Europe it’s true, but it took American’s to make a bun appropriately sized to the meat inside.
Like their plasterboard cabinets with the weird waxy cardboard windows, these hoddogs are cheap, tasteless and uninspired. One can only presume that they sell these as part of some obscure philosophy of scandinavian corporate responsibility that aims at providing the cheapest, most compactly packaged food, using only recycled and renewable material.
Do yourself a favor and save your money for the squeezable tubes of spiced herring.
IKEA dog: Grade D minus
