St. Louis Food Blog

Josh Bacott

​Suppose it's a weekend afternoon, and you have a hankering for a nice 13-inch chili dog for lunch. You'd like to go to Foxy's Red Hots or Woofie's to indulge, but you're stuck with a stout to-do list that requires a trip to the local hardware. As much as a hot-dog palace such as Foxy's might be calling your name, you'd have to make two separate stops, and that's just not efficient.

Not when there's a delightful alternative sitting right inside your neighborhood Home Depot. Dirty Dogz calls the primo real estate at the exits of three area Home Depots home. Now, as you're walking out of the home-improvement store, you can have the latest addition to the tool arsenal in one hand and a giant 'kraut- and onion-covered beef dog in the other.

I challenge you to find a scenario that wreaks of manliness more than that one.

When he's not cooking hot dogs, Dirty Dogz proprietor Jason Gaines runs a hot-air balloon company called St. Louis Ballooning Adventures. Probably the only duel hot-air balloon pilot/hot-dog vendor in the city, Gaines has taken the simple concept of a hot-dog cart and turned it into the perfect complement to the world's largest home-improvement chain.

But don't take that to mean Dirty Dogz is only appropriate when you've got business inside Home Depot. On my last trip to the Brentwood location, I had no reservations about walking directly from the entrance, straight past the checkout lines, to the Dirty Dogz stand to indulge in a chili-cheese dog complimented by a bag of Old Vienna Red Hot Riplets -- all for about $5. No hardware or tools purchased. In my mind, I'd just walked into a 60,000-square-foot hot-dog joint.

Josh Bacott

​Any excuse to stop in at one of the three area Dirty Dogz will be rewarded with a quality ballpark-esque treat. If you're not feeling like the house specialty hot dogs, the dry-eraseboard menu also advertises bratwursts, smoked sausage, the cleverly titled "Huge" Keilbasa and, in the non tubed-meat section, items such as nachos, tamales and the cryptic "Pepper Belly."

Whatever item you choose, Gaines has gone to great lengths to make sure that you have ample ways to dress your selection up, boasting over 200 condiments at your disposal -- enough to be awarded the title of Best Condiments by the RFT in 2008. And, really, it's about time that someone began offering "Ass Reaper" hot sauce to put on your smoked sausage.

Josh Bacott reports on his journey through one of the unhealthiest cities in the good ol' USA every other Friday. Because who says calories have to count?