Chicago hot dogs

A Portillo’s dog “dragged through the garden.”

A Portillo’s crew chief gets to work on a hot dog order at the Elgin, Ill., location. The first Portillo’s was known as the Dog House, a modest stand that opened in Villa Park, Ill., in 1963. Next year the chain will open its 42nd location, in Brandon, Fla.

The dining room of a Portillo’s in Elgin, Ill., on a Friday night in May. Among the guests were the families of 14-year-old baseball players from St. Louis, and a youth theater group performing Disney’s “My Son Pinocchio Junior.”

Gene & Jude’s, which opened in 1946, is on almost every list of best hot dogs in the United States, and for good reason. It serves a Vienna red hot on a plain steamed bun with mustard, relish, raw onion and sport peppers, wrapped in paper with fries right out of the frying oil.

Foot-long Vienna hot dogs dressed in the traditional Chicago garden trappings. The vendor started with zigzags of yellow mustard, then added green relish, chopped onion, two tomato wedges, a kosher dill pickle spear and two sport peppers, and topped with a generous shake of celery salt, all in a poppy seed steamed bun.

Allium, in the Four Seasons Hotel in downtown Chicago, serves a giant gourmet hot dog with homemade everything, including ketchup. It takes three days to make this hot dog, which costs $17. We had ours cut into four pieces, one for each member of our family.

35th Street Red Hots stands two blocks west of U.S. Cellular Field, the home of the Chicago White Sox. Visitors can order dogs with ketchup, but they need to ring the “bell of shame” first.

The 35th Street Red Hots dog is served wrapped with hot fries and placed in your hand at a temperature where you have to put it right down.

The “Comiskey Dogs” at U.S. Cellular Field are one of the most famous foods in baseball. There are two locations in the stadium — on the third-base line and in right field. Comiskey was a past owner of the White Sox and the Sox used to play in Comiskey Park, which was across the street. Today it’s a multi floor parking lot.