Some Commonly Asked Questions

Yesterday's Sausage Index: 3 spears of asparagus with sun-dried tomato feta sauce (non-sausage), plus 1/2 each beef and turkey sausages, cut up, in a box of Trader Joe's macaroni & cheese consumed with husband for dinner (sausages brought home because cosmetic flaws rendered them unsellable but emminently edible).

We set the cart up at Union Square yesterday for a special event with Allure Magazine. I was working the afternoon shift and arrived to see the cart abuzz with action. It was perhaps our best day yet, sales-wise. A prominent position on a busy corner didn't hurt. But I have to say that Union Square lacks the charm of our regualr spot in Bleecker Playground.

More people walking past the cart means more random querys.
Commonly Asked Questions
-Dogmatic...is this a cart for dogs?
-How long have you been here? Is this your regular spot?
-Do you have a permit for this? How did you get that permit? Was it hard?
-How do you get the hole in the bread?
-Do you have regular mustard?
-What's better, the beef or turkey?
Infrequently Asked Questions, Infrequently Made Comments
-What's a baguette?
-Is this free?
-This cartoon here on the sign of the woman with the sausage saying "Portable sausages...I don't get it"--well, I'm embarassed to say so, but I don't get it, either.
-Grilled asparagus--is that a sausage?

Pat and Jennifer Love Hewitt

Yesterday I ate two turkey dogs during my shift. The first was with sun-dried tomato feta sauce, which was gone for a bit and then came back. Sometimes we rotate sauces, and blue cheese didn't cut it for me, so the return of S-DTF was a happy sight.

Turkey dog #2 was with spicy metchup (spicy ketchup and Dijon mustard). I had dog #2 because it was a mistake; sometimes we throw one too many sausages on the grill. And I just can't chuck a good sausage.

Both dogs I gobbled up with animalistic speed. Standing there behind the cart, generally blocked from the view of passersby, I though of the chorus in the song "Jennifer Love Hewitt Litterbox":
In the Jennifer Love Hewitt Litterbox
Little band from Cotati, the Mismatched Socks
It's Patrick at Top Dog, he's gobbling a cock
The Jennifer Love Hewitt Litterbox
The song is by Willard's Canteen, the one-man band of Matt Pamatmat. (Listen to it here.) Pat is a curious fellow, a friend of ours who lives on Dr. Pepper, bacon, and sausage. He can drink a liter of Dr. Pepper in under two minutes. You think I am kidding, and for Pat's sake I wish I were.

Pat's favorite place to eat is Top Dog, the wonderful Berkeley, CA hot dog institution. Top Dog serves what is probably the closest thing to a New York hot dog in the entire San Francisco Bay Area, but they also serve veggie dogs, turkey dogs, brats, hot links, etc. Pat likes the calabrese. I eat hot dogs fast, but Pat has me cornered in the cock-speed department.

So yesterday I did my feeble Pat impression behind the Dogmatic cart. Pat my be fond of the noteworthy Top Dog, but in all other culinary arenas he is suspicious of quality. Dogmatic's baguettes would probably throw him off, although there is a chance he would go for the white cheddar jalapeno sauce.

Today I will try my best to forgo any dogs at work. I am doing a sausage micro-fast. But I am weak, and I may gobble a cock anyway, and as I'm gobbling a cock, I will think of Pat and say, "This dog's for you." And I'll say it with a mouth full of half-chewed sausage.

Dogmatic in the Times

See, I told you so. Scroll down a bit to see Dogmatic--we're under the blurb about the new Broadway Panhandler.

Hours of Web-Based Hot Dog Entertainment

Here's the excellent Hot Dog, Sausages, & Bratwursts area of the very active Roadfood forum--the place where I found out about the New Jersey hot dog tour I missed the bus for. If you have a hot dog concern or issue, it is a good place to go.

FloFab and the Inspector

If you are working at a mobile food vending cart and a health inspector shows up, you must drop everything you are doing until the inspection is over. Even if you have a line of ten people waiting for food, you cannot cook until the inspection is over. Even if Florence Fabricant from the New York Times comes by, in fact, which is what we found out the other day.

It was a slow period at the cart—mid-afternoon on a weekday. I was working with Jes, who had stepped away for a moment, and I was contemplating whether I should wipe crumbs off the spike machine or look into space thoughtfully when a tidy-looking man walked up to the cart with a distinct sense of purpose. He showed me his I.D. badge and license and told me he was a health inspector. I tried to hide my excitement—I’d just received my license in the mail and was eager to show it off to him—but he was not there to see me or my license. He wanted to see the permit for our icicle tricycle, the custom-built cooler-on-wheels that we serve gourmet sodas from.

Jes saw what was happening and scurried over to speak with the inspector; since he didn’t want to see my mobile food vending license, there was little I could do for him. They were going back and forth with calm civility about parks department regulations (the inspector was quite a nice fellow) when an older woman came up and introduced herself as Florence Fabricant from the New York Times (faithful readers may recognize her name from a snarky previous post about pigs in blankets). Wow! Florence Fabricant, the mouthpiece of all that’s shaking in the food world of New York, was right there at our spiffy little cart. But I was immobilized by the presence of the health inspector, and therefore unable to prepare a sausage for her.

It was incredibly awkward, mainly for me. I told Ms. Fabricant that the inspection would be over in just a few minutes, if she didn’t mind waiting, but she told me unfortunately she was in a hurry. We stood, she pressing buttons on her cell phone and me shoving my thumb further up my butt (that’s completely a figure of speech, by the way). I considered telling her that I was a food writer, but perhaps she would have asked me what my name was, and I’d tell her, and she’d say she didn’t recognize my name and ask me what kind of food writing I did, and I’d say, “Well, currently I write a little-read blog about working here at this gourmet sausage cart.”

It didn’t seem like a good idea. I thought about mentioning how I’d read her article about pigs in blankets, since it was sausage-related news, but I declined to do so. This is what separates those who get ahead from those who do not. Get-aheader: makes charming but idle chat with Florence Fabricant, tells her to read his or her fabulous sausage-cart blog, gets cushy gig at New York Times. Me: Just stands there.

The inspector left, and our Dogmatic cart received no violations. But Florence Fabricant departed before he did, saying she’d send someone on Friday. It was very eventful for an uneventful afternoon. Of course, I was not working on Friday, though I heard that someone from the Times did stop by the cart.

So keep an eye on the New York Times for Dogmatic. And we are in the latest Time Out New York, though to see the online edition you need to shell out some skrill.

Famous People

Some famous people came by the Dogmatic cart this weekend. I won’t say who they were, but I will say they were real people and not plastic, inhuman people like Jessica Simpson or Puff Diddlydoole. I will also say that the famous people got three turkey dogs and one beef dog. They were good customers.

I tried my best to be nonchalant towards the famous people, and because I was trying so hard I probably came across as a total ass-kissy nincompoop. The famous people didn’t seem to notice; I assume after years of celebrity, they have developed the skill to ignore the conspirational niceness of non-famous folks during everyday interactions.

As long as we’re having famous people visit our cart, I might as well become very dreamy and shallow and make a Dogmatic Famous Person Wish List.
-Any member of Sonic Youth, preferably Kim and Thurston with their daughter Coco in tow.
-Kirsten Dunst.
-Werner Herzog.
-The Olsen twins (either or both), just because it would make a good story to tell people at bars.
-Jonathan Ames, even though he’s not really famous, and even though I doubt he eats sausage. From his writing I’ve gleaned he’s not big on processed meat (even if it’s all-natural and nitrate- and nitrite-free), or any food item that gives one gastronomic pleasure, unless it’s a banana. Mr. Ames, please note that we do sell grilled asparagus spears, and that if you pass by the cart when I am working, I will comp an order for you, which is not something I would do for the Olsen twins.

Once Juliette Binoche came into the chocolate shop where I worked. She bought a pint of ultra-premium strawberry ice cream. I’m sure I acted silly around her, too. I wish it were not so. I am idealistic and simple and would prefer to treat all customers with equal kindness and professionalism. Come by and get a sausage and see if this is the case. Hopefully you are not famous, lest I act like a dingbat, but maybe you won’t even notice.

Man Push Cart

My food vendor license and I.D. badge came. I am so legit now. The envelope was square and it didn’t fit in our odd, narrow mailbox very well. I knew right away what was in it, and I tore into the envelope with the excitement of A Christmas Story’s Ralphie when his Little Orphan Annie decoder pin finally arrived in the mail. I wonder if I can use this I.D. to get into bars and stuff.

My husband and I took in our first feature at one of New York’s arty cinaplexes, and of course we saw a film about a mobile food vendor called Man Push Cart. The movingly dingy little movie has nothing to do with sausages, but I was moved to see it because the film’s protagonist, Ahmad, operates a roach coach on some anonymous busy New York City street corner. Even though the bulk of the story takes place out of the cart, that’s not how it feels; the scenes with Ahmad going about his daily pushcart routine are shot in such a claustrophobic tightness that it infiltrates the whole film—boxing him in, as it were.

Ahmad is boxed in in more ways than one. He rises at 2am to arrive at the commissary by 3am, and then he pulls the silvery mass of his cart however many blocks while fighting off the ominous headlights of hulking semi trucks and buses that whoosh past him bullyingly. Then Ahmad sells tea and coffee and bagels, then he pulls the cart back to the commissary, washes it, and makes his way back to his craphole apartment back in Brooklyn—but not before trying to hawk a few bootleg porn DVDs for extra cash.

Cash is Ahmed’s stumbling block. He has none. His wife is dead, he’s estranged from his young son, and the pop idol career he had back in Pakistan is only a shadow of a lost era. Ahmad is simply too emotionally and physically numb to make the push for a better life. He’s only a shell.

It’s not a happy movie, and it won’t be bringing in any new roach coach recruits any time soon. As far as I could tell, Man Push Cart’s depiction of mobile food vending is accurate—especially the scenes in the dismal, cave-like commissary. Luckily, we don’t have to move our cart manually like Ahmad; we have the Dogmatic cart towed. But not every pushcart proprietor can afford that. We also don’t have to carry a propane tank around like a silent sidekick, as Ahmad does. A little cash in hand, I guess, goes a long way to make a potentially miserable job a truly enjoyable one. We are fortunate that way.

Mobile food vending, for most people, is a very hard way of life. My husband and I left the theater, feeling glum after the film’s glum credits rolled. We stepped into the noisy, smoggy streets and the litter hovering above the balmy grates in the sidewalk, and we then vowed not to see any more movies set in gritty New York City in the theater as long as we continue to live here. Movies are for escape, not reality. We get enough of that.

Photo Compantion to the NJ Hot Dog Tour

This was my Ikea hot dog. Yeah. Not much to look at, not much to eat. I took a picture of the giant Ikea hot dog sign, with its blocky Ikea font touting 50-cent hot dogs under a photo of a massive hot dog striped with a squiggle of yellow mustard, but I somehow managed to delete the photo. Needless to say, the reality of Ikea dogs is much less pretty than the god-like proportions of the sign.
I actually took a lot of photos, but in keeping with the day's the spirit of loserdom (we'd missed the hot dog tour bus and instead had to set out on a pathetic hot dog tour of our own), I wound up deleting most of those photos--including the gorgeous chili and kraut dogs we got at Galloping Hill Inn. But here is the sign. Unlike the hot dog in the sign, the real Galloping Hill Inn hot dogs did not have little arms bearing trays of beer and burgers. Sigh. They were still wonderful.

The Tragically Truncated NJ Hot Dog Tour

I am such a loser. All week long I had been looking forward to the third annual New Jersey Hot Dog Tour, which entails a comfy charter bus, eleven highly revered New Jersey hot dog joints, and the insights of not only our tour guide, hot dog authority John Fox, but of hot dog authority Erwin Benz (Benzee) and a bus full of hot dog maniacs. I could hardly sleep the night before, I was so excited.

And we missed the bus. Of course. That’s the last time I’ll ever get New Jersey driving directions from Mapquest. It’s so sad, too. I’d laid everything out the night before: tape recorder with a fresh cassette and batteries, digital and non-digital cameras, directions to and from New Jersey, maps, cell phone, list of hot dog joints we’d visit.

We got a slightly late start, because my husband was not as enthused about the prospect of devoting an entire Saturday to gorging on hot dogs as I was. But we were doing okay—maybe we’d miss the first stop on the tour, that’s all—we drove and drove deeper into god knows where strip mall hell, and I knew something was amiss. I pulled out my cell phone to call the tour’s organizer, only to realize I’d left his number at home. We were screwed.

A friendly AAA employee helped us get sorted out, and she redirected us to get back to the tour bus departure point: the Galloping Hill Inn in Union. Yes, the bus would be gone, but at least we could get hot dogs there on our own. Maybe the Inn’s proprietor would know where we could catch up with them. I refused to call the day a failure.

The Galloping Hill Inn is a cheery, popular place; it’s been operating since 1925, and as its soda cups inform you, it was featured on the Food Network. I can see why. Their dogs were fantastic. I ordered a chili dog, and I opted for what I assume are traditional New Jersey toppings of spicy brown mustard and chopped raw onions. (Swap the spicy mustard for yellow and add slaw and you’ll have yourself something quite close to West Virginia hot dog.) The pork/beef frank was griddled, and its natural casing had a great pop. If a frankfurter could be smooth-tasting, that was the one. I was impressed with its mildness yet clarity of flavor. The substantial bun was glossy, puffy with a good chew—a Kaiser bun in hot dog roll form. The chili was pasty and runny like West Virginia hot dog chili, but it was spiced like a less assertive version of Cincinnati chili. In my journal, I wrote “I’d have to get this whole thing, even if I were full. Yummy.” I was enamored.

My dear husband got a hot dog with kraut, relish, and spicy mustard. The relish was tart and not overly sweet—an outstanding relish for adult tastes.

The happy fullness in our bellies clashed with the melancholy sense of loss from missing the tour bus. I inquired inside if anyone knew where they were or how to reach them, but no one did. There was only one way to salvage the day, and that was to drive to Ikea in Elizabeth.

I did have directions to Ikea, and unlike the directions to Galloping Hill Inn, they worked. We bought shelves and a hamper and some cheap candles that smelled like fabric softener. More importantly, I got a hot dog. Ikea hot dogs are 50 cents, and they taste like it. The frank was narrow, wobbly, and rubbery, the bun pallid and listless. I dotted it with ketchup and mustard and washed it down with my brilliant cocktail of Diet Pepsi and lingdonberry juice. We also got these little Swedish junk food cookies that had a dot of raspberry gel on top and a filling of vanilla crème.

We drove across Staten Island to Brooklyn and then back to Queens, where we assembled our new furniture. We had salad for dinner. I can only imagine the internal damage wrought by consuming up to eleven hot dogs instead of two, but I would have been happy to risk it. As it was, at least I was able to cobble together a sorry little hot dog tour of my own. There’s always next year.

Bonus Baguettes

One of the best perks of a foodservice job is leftovers. I once brought home two roasted beef tenderloins from a catering event and enjoyed hot beef sandwiches with blue cheese and caramelized onions for three days solid. And when I worked at Dean & Deluca in Napa Valley, I routinely brought home sample products, which kept my pantry stocked for nearly a year. I had a wardrobe of a dozen top-quality vinegars. It was dreamy. Dean & Deluca had a rotisserie, and after we roasted ducks one day, I brought about a dozen duck carcasses home to make stock. The smell of the simmering stock was so strong it woke me up at night. It was great stock, but quite powerful. A woman living on her own has only so many uses for two gallons of rich roasted duck stock. I wound up reducing it to a glace and freezing it in ice cube trays so I could easily enrich sauces and stir-fries.

My food haul from Dogmatic seems to be going straight to my belly during my shifts—I can’t very well bring home cold grilled sausages, now, can I? Well, actually, I am the kind of person that would. I recall how my mother once mortified me by stuffing napkin-wrapped oatmeal cookies into her purse from the buffet at a small collage’s perspective students weekend. But the joke’s on me, because the older I get, the more like her I am. I had probably about fifteen pounds of chocolate in my kitchen when I worked at Scharffen Berger Chocolate Maker; I’m only now down to my last 9.7 ounces. The thought of actually having to buy chocolate crushes me.

Oh, I’ll cope. In the meantime, I am enjoying baguettes. We serve Dogmatic sausages in toasted baguettes from Tom Cat Bakery. I love baguettes, the brittle micro-veneer of caramelized crust that gives way to a creamy, chewy interior. At the end of the day, we always have a few baguettes around. And since we don’t serve day-old baguettes, they are free for the taking.

The mom in me kicked in. I’ve been brainstorming uses for leftover baguettes: panzanella, savory bread pudding, croutons, crostini...but I’ve held off, for I hope soon the novelty of stale artisan baguettes will fade. My husband and I need to eat more whole grains; our current diet needs no supplements of white bread.

The other day, though, I did give in. I brought a baguette home for our dinner: sloppy joes made with vegetarian grounds (as per my sausagetarin guidelines). We didn’t have any buns at home, and before leaving work I figured a baguette beats a bun any day. I hollowed out two baguette ends by impaling them on the spike, then I wrapped them in foil. At home, I warmed them in the oven before stuffing them with sloppy joe filling, making more of a grinder than a sloppy joe. It was wonderful.

Please understand there’s no love lost between me and squishy white Wonder Bread hot dog buns; it’s just that I enjoy those exclusively when they contain a frankfurter. If I worked at, say, Papaya King, I’d not be clamoring to take day-old hot dog buns home. In fact, I bet I would not be allowed to. Once more reason my job is awesome.

The Sausagetatian Lifestyle

Yesterday I arrived at the Bleecker Playground for my Dogmatic shift with the full intention of not having any sausage that day. I’d enjoyed a big bowl of homemade turkey and rice soup, along with a crusty roll, and I’d packed an apple with me to snack on if hunger struck midway through my shift.

I got to the cart early and ate the apple before I even began working. Then I suited up in my chef coat and apron and grilled off a few sausages for customers. I enjoy seeing people’s reactions to both the presence of our cart and its offerings. We have a sign on the side of the cart (see photo) with a drawing of a mopey woman saying “Portable sausages? I don’t get it.” Most people do get it, and get it quickly. What about artisan sausage in a toasted baguette is there not to get? Meat, bread, Bob’s your uncle. Some passersby are perhaps a bit timid, or a bit full, or a bit hurried, but I sometimes see the wheels turning in their minds, filing us away in their memory.

And some people really don’t get it. Backcountry camping, the band Ween, living in New York City—these are all things you either get or don’t get. Add sausage to this list. The people who don’t get Dogmatic walk on and continue with their lives. Maybe they get something that I don’t get, things like baseball or Scientology. You can’t expect any one person to get everything.

Enough people get us that I have brief but rewarding exchanges with customers every day. Some people get very excited when they see our spike machine, which impales the bread and toasts it from the inside out. Some people—usually European expats—recognize this baguette-toasting method from their homeland, and they smile knowingly. But being an American establishment, Dogmatic offers elaborate, multi-syllable gourmet sauces like Sun-Dried Tomato Feta, which I’m guessing they don’t do in Europe.

So observing what people do when they see the cart is all part of the fun. The other part of the fun is cooking and grilling the sausages. I can’t wait until I’m working the grill and we get slammed. I want my grilling-and-filling motions to be efficient and poetic. There’s some footage in Rick Sebak’s A Hot Dog Program of an employee at Gray’s Papaya flipping several dozen hot dogs on the flattop with one flick of an offset spatula. It’s mesmerizing. Someday, that’s going to be me turning sausages so beautifully.

In the meantime, I have some work to do. I need to be faster, but yesterday was not terribly busy, and I had no chances to practice this dog-flip maneuver. Instead, I got hungry an hour into my shift and ate a dog—beef with sun-dried tomato feta. I think maybe I like the beef dogs best, at least for now. I’ll probably change my mind tomorrow. Anyway, my turkey and rice soup and healthful apple snack did not deter me from caving in to the whims of the sausage gods. Once I’d prepared my hefty sausage snack, we had some customers, so I wrapped my beef-feta dog in a foil bag and attacked it a few minutes later, once business had been taken care of. The sauce had soaked into the bread a bit. It was kind of nice. Our sausages are extra-portable that way.

Not long after I’d broken my sausage fast, the lady from the ice cream truck across the playground came over to say hello. We talked about the weather predictions for the week, and what days we were planning on being at the playground. We offered her sausage and she offered us ice cream. Of course I took her up on this offer—ice cream! She pulled up to the curb right before she left for the day, and she made me a vanilla cone with an extra-tall swirly top. Her truck is a Captain Softee truck, which I assume is a Mister Softee knockoff. The ice cream was fluffy, with the appealing but highly artificial flavor of mass-produced marshmallows. I might even prefer it to Mister Softee. We owe her a dog now. I want to become friendly with our new vending neighbor, but it could be dangerous. I may have to choose between ice cream and sausage.

In any case, once the turkey soup is finished, I’m going to give the sausagetarian lifestyle a go—no more meat for me unless it’s in sausage form. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

My Job Is Cooler Than Yours

I work at a gourmet sausage cart. Most of you reading this are probably at work right now, taking a little internet respite from desk-bound tasks. I’m sure you make more money than me (although Dogmatic does pay me a very decent and fair wage). But, while I grill sausages and squirt tasty sauces into toasted buns, I am quite possibly having way more fun than you. Working at a sausage cart is so awesome—I get to meet new people, be outside, and gobble excellent sausages during my break. Every day I plan to try a new sausage/sauce combination. I used to give tours of a chocolate factory, and very few people arrive at a chocolate factory feeling grumpy and demanding. The same, so far, seems to be true of the Dogmatic cart; people eat sausage because they want to, not because they have to. It makes for much merrier interaction with the public than if I worked at, say, the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene at 42 Broadway, where the majority of the employees sit behind sliding glass windows emitting the distinctive whiff of disgruntlement.

In any case, I’m still a pushcart neophyte, and I should not be so quick to pronounce my contentment with my present sausage career. I have a lot of things to learn. Here is a roundup of things I learned during our first two days of operation:
-Don’t break up big chunks of ice by slamming them against the stainless steel surface of the cart. It dents the cart.
-Plastic gloves can melt, but if you wear two pairs, the heat only melts through one pair.
-Everything close to the grill and the bain marie gets hot. Might as well burn yourself now and get it over with.
-If there are only two people working and you are handling the cash and wearing the money belt, don’t wander off during your sausage-scarfing break to visit with the park custodian in her office in the playground.
-If a crazy homeless guy dressed like a leather pirate comes up to you and tells you how he lost his eye in the Iraq war seven months ago, don’t encourage him. Ignore him.

In order to better understand our product, I have been diligently sampling sausages. These come from Violet Hill Farm “upstate,” I am told, though I’m not sure upstate where; there’s a lot of up to the state. Currently we offer turkey and beef sausages, as well as a grilled asparagus option for vegetarian folks (actually, if you had the asparagus with pesto, Dijon, or spicy ketchup, it would be vegan). The turkey sausage has, to me, a slightly bratwurst-like flavor—generally mild, with a peppery finish. The beef sausage is more robust. One customer noted its similarity in color and flavor to a Slim Jim. I’d have to agree—the beef sausages are a lovely brownish-red shade—but our sausages are missing the preservatives and the professional wrestler pitchmen that Slim Jims are known for. They also don’t leave that greasy film on the roof of your mouth. Hmm, maybe they’re not so much like Slim Jims.

I can’t decide if I prefer the beef or the turkey. Maybe I’ll never have a favorite. The popular combinations so far among Dogmatic employees seem to be beef sausage with sun-dried tomato feta sauce, and turkey sausage with white-cheddar jalapeno sauce. The white-cheddar jalapeno sauce is rich and creamy, and much less spicy than you’d figure. It reminds me of the béchamel sauce used on classic homemade macaroni and cheese, only with a kick. The sun-dried tomato feta sauce is bright and tangy, but not as spicy. We also have Dijon mustard and spicy ketchup. “Do you have regular mustard or non-spicy ketchup?” a few people have asked. Um, no, I say to them, and then I recommend the sun-dried tomato feta sauce. Generically throughout New York City, pushcarts and sausage/hot dog vendors don’t offer yellow mustard, so we are hardly charting new waters of mustard exclusivity. I’m a fan of spicy mustard, so it does not bother me, but it seems unfair to those who prefer wussy mustard.

As for the spicy ketchup, I feel it’s our most underrated condiment; it’s not spicy-hot, per se, but it does have a nice pep to it, thanks to house-made hot sauce. It has a really clean taste, not too vingegary, and it would be fantastic on French fries (which we don’t sell, but who needs fries when you have sausage).

The grilled asparagus is going to be my salvation. I’ve decided to not eat more than one baguette-bound sausage a day, and so if hunger pangs attack, grilled asparagus it is. Either one of the cheese sauces makes the asparagus dog a substantial meal. Several customers have been confused about the asparagus dog, thinking it’s some kind of asparagus sausage, which conjures to me images of green goop in casings, some kind of Kermit the Frog sausage. So no, it’s simply lovely spears of grilled asparagus. Be glad if it.

But grilling sausages for hours sure does make you want to eat a sausage. They sizzle and blister so fetchingly on that cast-iron grate, and I always give in. I may have to go on a no-meat diet, with a sausage exception. I’ll be a sausagetarian.

The Cart Is Open!

Dogmatic opened this past weekend. (“Hmph,” you folks must think, “about time!”) Overall it was great, though of course there were some literal and figurative obstacles we had to overcome, most of which had to do with getting the cart and its contents to and from the site at Bleecker Playground.

On Saturday morning, I emerged from the subway to find Manhattan semi-deserted. Weekend mornings in Manhattan are the blissfully deceptive; very few people are out, and as you jaywalk without having to dodge too many cars or cut off any pokey pedestrians, you get tricked into thinking that the city belongs to you, and that you, for once, are at equilibrium with the oft-overwhelming metropolis. Then you walk into the commissary to pick up your sausage cart.

Pushcarts must, by law, be stored in a facility approved by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. A commissary is like a combination parking garage, car wash, and food wholesaler for pushcarts. In the morning, it is a hive of frantic activity, as pushcart operators and employees of the commissary smash well-dented pushcarts into each other as they try to extricate individual carts from the mess. Our cart, naturally, was way back against the wall.

A commissary is really interesting for about five minutes, and then it’s simply another depressing place you want to hightail out of. It was dark and impossibly crowded, with a potent smell of industrial cleaners. There’s also an intriguing cultural element, which I won’t get into since I’ve only been to the commissary twice, but I think that Saturday was the first time three young, skinny white chicks ever came in to pick up a cart. Men who spoke poor English kept on approaching us and introducing themselves with very wide smiles.

Lots of pushcarts purchase all of their supplies for the day at the commissary, stock their carts, and roll out to feed the hungry masses. Dogmatic’s food comes from elsewhere, but we did pick up several cases of cola. While waiting in line, I peered at other carts’ order for the day—piles of soda, pale and spongy hot dog buns, and mysterious foil bags that had “Sabrett’ stamped on them. These, it turned out, were sacks of onion sauce for hot dogs, which surprised me, until I considered that most pushcarts don’t have the space or equipment to griddle onions and stew them in sauce—of course they don’t make the sauce themselves. Even after having a decent amount of foodservice work experience in some pretty diverse settings, I’m always taken aback to see what happens behind the scenes with the foods we hurriedly eat: paper-wrapped hamburgers that sit under a heat lamp at McDonald’s, or Dairy Queen Dilly Bars that somehow seem to appear there magically, without one trace of human element. Someone in a factory somewhere cooks up industrial batches of hot dog sauce in computerized vats, probably, and then a depositor squirts the proper amount of sauce into the foil bags that wind up at the factory. So many separate elements to one $2 dirty water hot dog!

Once our cart was freed from the pushcart traffic jam inside the commissary, we filled the tanks with water and located a person to tow our cart to the playground—otherwise we’d have to push it about 30 blocks ourselves. 30 blocks is not terrible, really, but it is when you have a gigantic stainless steel cart with several hundred extra pounds of batteries and water.

While the other girls rode down in the truck towing the cart, I took a cab down to Employees Only, the restaurant where our cart’s food comes from—not foil bags of gloppy sauce for us! I found Jeremy Spector, the chef of Employees Only and, by extension, Dogmatic. He’s definitely one of the more laid-back and approachable chefs I’ve worked with—which is fortunate, because I continuously had to bug him to help me locate sausages, sauces, dry ice, bleach water, etc. Jeremy's approach to cooking is straightforward yet highly flavorful, perfectly suited for the offerings of a gourmet sausage cart.

After picking up the supplies, we journeyed several blocks north to meet the cart, now settled into its spot just outside the bustling playground. We installed the propane tank, fired up the grill and baguette-toasting machines, iced down our drinks and food, and were finally ready to sell sausages. Which we did, and which I shall tell you more about in the next post. Until then, please be aware that the cart will no reappear at Bleecker Playground until Wednesday, September 13; we are taking the cart in for modifications so that your sausage-eating experience will attain maximum pleasure.