A Big Red, Please, Heavy on the Nostalgia, but Hold the Relish on Those Steak Burgers

This is a time of year when we order a lot of our food standing up, at places coincidentally known as stands. But there are stands, and there are stands.

Nobody would mistake Rubin’s Red Hot for just another place to get a hot dog. Considering that it’s in competition with the Sherman Oaks Galleria right across Ventura Boulevard, it’s a real eye-catcher; people slow down when they see it. In front of the place, as its equivalent of the Golden Arches, is a 38-foot segment of the old Chicago elevated railway. The building itself, a narrow, straggling, steep-roofed structure crowded between a freeway retaining wall and an alley, is made of corrugated aluminum.

In other words, it looks like one of the less glamorous parts of a rail yard. The owner says he opened it out of nostalgia for the snack stands under the “el” where he ate as a kid, and he chose his site cleverly; being practically under the San Diego Freeway is the Los Angeles equivalent to being under the elevated railway.

Another kind of nostalgia must be involved in the presence of a piano and a cylindrical Parisian flower and magazine kiosk. Cute. But I’m getting tired of standing in this line. What’s to eat?

The best thing, and it really is good, is Big Red, a kosher hot dog in an onion-poppy seed bun with mustard, minced onion, tomato, a pickled yellow pepper and a slice of limp cucumber sprinkled with cayenne. This is a hot dog worthy of the name. By comparison, the Regular Red is a smaller sausage and comes loaded with sweet pickle relish of an alarming shade of green. It’s nowhere near as good, and I feel slightly offended that it’s said to be “California style.”

The second best thing is the steak burger, which really does taste made from chopped steak. I’d order it without the sweet pepper relish, though; it really does the beef about as much good as a spoonful of jam. There’s also a decent veal bratwurst with grilled red onions that must have been marinated in vinegar, and a juicy, rather hard-to-handle Polish sausage with sauerkraut.

The rest of the food is perfectly good chicken and swordfish burgers and salads, a thick beef barley soup full of dried mushrooms that must be somebody’s idea of comfort food because it is not what you call excitement food, and a rather dreary chili of burger meat stewed with tomato sauce. Stick to the stuff you can eat standing up, say I.

Recommended dishes: Big Red, $2.80; steak burger, $2.70.

Rubin’s Red Hot, 15322 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks. (818) 905-6515. Open 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., Sunday through Thursday; 11 a.m. to 10 p.m., Friday and Saturday. No alcoholic beverages. Parking lot behind Koester Auto Repair on Dickens Street.; drive-through entrance on Sepulveda Boulevard. No credit cards. Lunch for one, $2.75 to $7.80.