“Superdawg is the last drive-in restaurant in the city of Chicago, and has been in business for 76 years.” Bon Appétit spends a day on the line with the Drucker family, owners of Superdawg in Chicago. Founded in 1948, the restaurant is still family-run and is the last remaining original drive-in spot in the city.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00Superdog is the last drive-in restaurant in the city of Chicago and has been in
00:05business for 76 years. We have car hop service 362 days of the year.
00:13My mother-in-law and father-in-law started the business back in 1948.
00:18We sell hundreds of thousands of Superdogs every year. We just keep doing the same
00:24thing day in and day out.
00:30Welcome to Superdog, our family business. I'm Don, one of the co-owners. Come on
00:38inside.
00:50Every sandwich that we serve comes with fries. So the way the machine works is we
00:56put the potato in the chute, go forward, backwards, forward, backwards, and the
01:01potatoes come out, crinkle on all four sides. Our french fry slicer has been
01:07with us since we opened in 1948. We've had to weld it at times when the handle
01:13is broken. No other restaurant has this exact machine. We bring in about 3,000
01:21pounds of potatoes every week and we hand cut every single one of them. We've
01:27rinsed the potatoes before we start to blanch so that we get all the starch off
01:34of the potato. That will help them to fry better. Blanching is basically like
01:41par-cooking and what we do is we take the potato and we're gonna put it in the
01:47shortening and we're just gonna let it start to fry about halfway. We are
01:53looking for it to get soft to the touch and then we're gonna bring them over to
01:58our blanch rack over here and hang it so that it will dry and cool down. If you
02:06cook the potatoes straight through, they're not gonna get crisp as well as
02:10if they dry out a little bit but these fries will be gone by the end of our
02:16lunch rush. It's 11 o'clock. We have customers waiting at the front counter.
02:24We're gonna turn the lights on and open up for business.
02:31All right, so we're in the kitchen here and the kitchen itself is the original
02:36building. It's 12 by 20 so it's very tight and very small. We have a custom
02:41made steam table. It was made back in 1948 when we first opened. It was designed by
02:47my father-in-law Morrie. We have two chambers for buns and two chambers for
02:52dogs. The chamber with the tag on it is so that we know that's the one that's
02:58cooking and getting ready. The one that doesn't have the tag is the one that we
03:02work out of. A traditional Chicago hot dog is steamed rather than charbroiled.
03:08Periodically throughout the day we will need to add water to the chamber because
03:14the water will boil off. This order is for just two super dogs. We use the
03:19traditional Chicago condiments. Golden mustard, the bright neon green relish, the
03:26white chopped onions, kosher pickle spear, hot sport pepper if you like. One is
03:32gonna be just mustard and relish with easy mustard and one is gonna be what we
03:37call hold the pickle with peppers. So we call it hold the pickle including. The
03:43boxes are made specifically for us to be able to hold the dog and the fries and
03:48it's designed so that we can just pop it against ourselves and it will then lock
03:53on the bottom. It's specially vented so that the steam that's in the box are
03:59able to escape so that it doesn't get soggy.
04:04And that's our first dog. Our second one is gonna be hold the pickle including.
04:10Which means no pickles and with peppers.
04:26We're getting kind of busy. The switchboard will be ringing. Hiya, thanks for
04:31stopping. May I take your order please? My wife Lisa is the master operator of
04:36our switchboard and she is very enthusiastic about answering the
04:41switchboard so she will be the one taking all the orders up there. So cars
04:45pull into our parking lot, pull up to a space. The spaces are all numbered. They're
04:50numbered for us. The cars don't know what numbers they are but we do. You press the
04:55button which signals us inside that they want to order. The most important thing
05:00that we have to do, the very first thing, is write down the space number because
05:06we don't want space number six to get space number 26's order. We're the only
05:12drive-in left in Chicago really in the whole metro area. In the late 1940s and
05:1850s when my parents started, drive-ins were prevalent in Chicago. Most homes
05:23didn't have air conditioning yet so people were looking for an escape.
05:27So people would hop in their car, get some air and be able to enjoy dining in
05:33their car in an outdoor setting. Hiya, thanks for stopping. May I take your
05:38order please? Sure. Sure, I've got a regular size. Being the daughter of Superdog, I've been here my whole life. My earliest
05:54recollection is as a very small child, about four years old, actually sitting
05:58right here at my mother's feet learning my letters and numbers. Then I began to
06:03mature and become their equal, their side-by-side worker. It's 1230. We're in
06:13the middle of our lunch rush and I'm going to turn you over to my daughter
06:16Stacey Drucker, who's going to be your car hop.
06:23And we're ready to go. Being a car hop, once the food's ready, I put it on a tray
06:28and bring it out to your car. And then once you're done eating, you flip up a
06:33switch on the speaker so that we know to come and collect the tray and the
06:37garbage so I make that second trip back to you too. The challenges of being a car
06:43hop, primarily the weather. We're open 362 days a year and we're out here in
06:48all seasons. And a strawberry shake. When people ask like how long I've been
06:53working here, I always say I've worked here my whole life. Growing up in a
06:56family business, there really isn't that delineation between work and life.
07:02The city's really living up to its name today, that's for sure. I would come here and my grandma would take orders on the
07:07switchboard and I would run them down and like throw them into the kitchen and
07:10then eventually I graduated to like be the car hop and do all the other tasks.
07:26This order right here, being taken, is gonna need two super cheesies.
07:31Adriana, when she's done taking the order, is gonna call it to the grill and
07:36then they're gonna echo it back so that she knows what she wants them to cook is
07:42actually what they're going to cook.
07:47We've got another order for five super dogs here. Everything and two of them are
07:53including. So we're gonna take out five buns right now and we're
07:59really getting a few more orders here guys. We better kick it up a little bit.
08:04Everything. The kitchen itself is very small. It's very efficient though because
08:10nobody really has to move. We can just hand things to each other back and forth
08:14and talk. Our dog man is kind of our quarterback. He's the guy pulling the
08:19super dogs out of the water. Been doing this long enough that not too much
08:24stresses us out. We just come every day and knock it out and then we breathe at
08:29the end. From taking the bun out and putting the dog in the bun and then
08:33making it, we're probably looking at about 15-20 seconds.
08:42Cheesy's preparer is gonna make one mustard pickle ketchup and one
08:47ketchup pickle. Ready for a straw shake for the window and a chalk shake for the
08:52window. It's getting to be closer to two o'clock now. After the lunch rush kind of
08:59dies down, I'm gonna swap out with Lucas so that I can go do a little bit of
09:04administrative work. Try to fit that in whenever I can. I'll be able to go place
09:09orders. Certain days I'll do payroll or make service calls if we need something
09:13repaired.
09:19Well, lunchtime is over. I really hope that you had a good time. Thanks for
09:23stopping.