Lunch: Bark Hot Dogs

Hot dogs may be one of the most basic New York foods: a tube of beef or pork, a squishy bun, and some mustard, ketchup and relish. Simple, right? Wrong. Hot dogs just got a whole lot more gourmet at Bark Hot Dogs in Park Slope.

There are 10 different kinds of hot dog on the menu at this airy, industrial space with communal tables and high school science lab stools. But Bark’s are a different kind of mystery meat from your traditional dirty water dog. Commissioned from Hartmann’s Old World Sausage in Rochester, the recipe is a private label affair, with the exact mix of ingredients kept secret. But the mix of pork and beef with garlic and spices served as an excellent canvas for the creations that followed.

A Kraut Dog ($5.75), left, and NYC Dog ($5), right, tasted radically different from each other, though both started with the same base. Crunchy, newly pickled sauerkraut from the upstate Hawthorne Valley farm, also available at the Union Square Greenmarket, gave the Kraut dog real Munich flavor without the bulkiness of a German sausage. This was a great reinvention of what the original hot dog must have tasted like. The NYC dog, topped with sweet and sour onions and mustard, had a much sweeter, Americanized taste on first bite. Bark’s version is not a dumbed-down American hot dog, however, but an artisanal spin on the original, with the tangy-sweet onion mixture made in house.

Almost all the ingredients that are not made in house are sourced from specialty providers, many of them local and organic. This earnestness about sustainability plays out to almost comic effect, with a placard on each table telling you where the restaurant gets everything from hot  peppers for the chili to the organic vanilla beans that flavor the milkshakes to the wood beams for the tables under your elbows. Also listed are credits for restaurant design, website design, and even the electricity. (“I’d like to thank Green Power of Con Edison….”)  It’s a bit like the copious credits at the end of the Sopranos, ridiculously long for a TV show.

Fortunately, Bark Hot Dogs stops short of going overboard with the actual food, sourcing the mustard from French’s and the buns from Pepperidge Farm, because, as they explain in the notes, “Some things are just American classics.”

The onion rings were so crispy and light, coated with an almost tempura-like batter, that they practically stole the show from the hot dogs. It’s another sign that chef-owners Joshua Sharkey and Brandon Gillis are not content to just stop at dogs: they also offer breakfast egg sandwiches, seasonal specials and the infamous Gorilla Warfare beer, a mix of beer and potent Gorilla coffee.

Even if you can’t think of any other excuse to head to the border of Prospect Heights and Park Slope for lunch – Eugenia Kim hats at the nearby Target? – Bark Hot Dogs alone is worth the trip.

Bark Hot Dogs
474 Bergen Street between Flatbush and Fifth Avenues
Brooklyn, NY‎
718-789-1939‎
barkhotdogs.com