Foodie Digest

I’ve been educated on the wonders of Vienna beef over the past decade. I was hailed as a hero when I discovered (the now defunct) Chi-Dogs in Santa Clara and have facilitated treks out of SF to find the coveted Chicago dog and italian beef throughout the Bay area.

Imagine my glee when I received my latest Tablehopper newsletter telling me about Da Beef. Not only is it in SF, but it’s blocks from our house. Bummer is it’s only open M-F until 6, and on Saturday until 5.

We walked to Rocco’s for dinner on night and start looking for Da Beef. Tablehopper and Da Beef’s web site said 300 7th street. Um, that’s an Oil can henry’s. We were confused until we looked into the garage of Oil Can Henry’s and saw a hot dog cart.

A hot dog cart! This new food find, this restaurant carrying the highly sought after vienna beef is a hot dog cart! This could be good news (low overhead) or bad news (they might move out of our neighborhood at any time).

Either way, we decide to give them a shot. The web site said they will be carrying italian beef shortly, so we headed over to get some chicago style hot dogs. Made with vienna beef.

The good

• the dogs are Vienna beef. Be warned they are the jumbo size (why oh why is everything super-sized!)
• the buns are imported from chicago. They are steamed and perfectly prepared.
• the have nuclear green relish!
• they use celery salt, have chopped onions, pickles, sport peppers and mustard
• they were giving out free samples of the soon to be available italian beef
• the dogs were prepared perfectly; definitely solved a chicago dog craving.

The “needs improvement” (I’m not going to say bad. This is what’s preventing Da Beef from being perfectly perfect).

• no tomatoes! They aren’t currently set up to have fresh cut tomatoes but it’s coming
• no official italian beef yet. Because they don’t have the sweet peppers or the giardiniera, they are waiting before they sell this. Good move. We also thought the italian beef could be “wetter” but again, it was a free taste.
• they need better hours! I’m not sure which crowd they are catering toward yet. I hope they get enough business to stay in business but it’d be great to be able to swing by there after work.  ‘course maybe it’s better for me—healthwise—that they aren’t :).

Overall thumbs: Way up! There were 3 of us and we all thought our dogs were great.

Food tastiness: Perfect.

Service rating: The two women who run this cart are friendly and knowledgeable. They definitely researched the market and area and knew all the places we knew they served vienna beef. We only wish they had lawn chairs or something to sit in while we ate.

WW points: Do you really want to know? The jumbo vienna beef dogs are 7 points (bun not included). I need to lobby the Da Beef folks to include the regular size…