The Best Hot Dog In Town

One of the reasons I love traveling so much is that it allows me to sample some food that I ordinarily wouldn't be able to eat in my sheltered little world around Washington, D.C. When I first booked my recent trip to Iceland and started hunting around for what new culinary delicacies I might encounter there, I was intrigued. While I had no desire to sample any hakarl (a type of kidney-less shark that has to be fermented for six months before it is edible) or rams' testicles, I thought I might get to try some puffin, some Icelandic lobster or maybe even some whale, although the ethical issues with whale meat might have scared me off. In my wildest imaginings, I had visions of McDonald's serving Puffin McMuffins for breakfast. That's before I knew McDonald's had come and gone to Iceland, apparently scared off by the country going almost bankrupt in 2008.

But between a packed itinerary for that vacation and a lot of other goings on in life, I just didn't see that a lot of research into food in Iceland would pay off much. So while I ended up sampling skyr, Icelandic meat soup, rye bread baked underground using geothermal heat and a bag or two of paprika flavored potato chips, I missed out on puffin, lobster, whale and some foods that would literally make my stomach turn. I regret not spending some time looking into restaurants before arriving since our one excursion to an actual restaurant, Icelandic Fish and Chips, was pretty much as disappointing as you could get.

But despite all that, there was one food experience in Iceland I was determined to NOT miss out on: eating a hot dog on the street. That's right, a street hot dog. Apparently, Icelanders are nuts for hot dogs to the point of it being a bit of a national obsession. And if you are going to have a hot dog in Iceland, you have to do it at Bæjarins Beztu Pylsur, a hot dog stand located in what looks like a triangular leftover parcel of land a couple of blocks from the harbor in downtown Reykjavik. There are three other locations in the city but the one to go to is the original at Tryggvatagata 1.

It has been reported that greater than 50% of all Icelanders have eaten a hot dog from Bæjarins Beztu Pylsur, which translates to "the best hot dog in town." How someone came up with this statistic, I have no idea. In August 2006, the British newspaper The Guardian named it the best hot dog stand in Europe, for what that's worth. And if all that weren't enough, apparently Madonna, James Hetfield and Bill Clinton have all stopped by for a bite. With this sort of mythology surrounding it, and having already hit up Tail o' The Pup and Pink's on separate trips to Los Angeles, I knew I had to stop by before we left town.

As luck would have it, we stumbled upon the stand quite by accident on our first day in country after getting off our non-whale watching trip at a time when we were just looking for a snack to tide us over before our jet-lagged bodies gave out and we succumbed to sleep. It was cold and snowy and already really dark at 4 p.m. and either the weather or the hour had scared away the line that everything I had read about this place said we would encounter. Admittedly, two other people showed up right after we got there but when we ordered two hot dogs with everything, we were the only ones there.

Ordering with everything is supposed to be the way to go here so we complied with local custom. Everything in this case means raw onions, fried onions, ketchup, remoulade and sweet Icelandic mustard. About 15 seconds after ordering, I was presented with two hot dogs which looked decidedly not like they had "everything" on them. I had apparently missed the two applications of onions which were concealed below the frank but indeed everything was there. It all happened so fast. Finding the only table there covered with a thin film of snow, we elected to eat standing up.

The hot dogs we ate here were a quick cheap meal that provided a bit of warmth both in terms of the temperature of the food and the feeling that we were doing something uniquely Icelandic and they were very welcome. The taste itself was not as salty as a regular hot dog, either through a lack of salt in the sausage or through being masked by the sweetness of the mustard, which definitely shone through the sauces. There was also something crunchy in the toppings which was either the raw onions, or something in the remoulade. The texture was almost like tiny sushi roe combined with Rice Krispies. Not as sketchy as it sounds.

I've eaten a lot of hot dogs in my life. Possibly too many. And I'm just not sure I have a perfect hot dog. Most hot dogs I've eaten have been microwaved or boiled in my own place and slathered with mustard and sauerkraut. I just haven't had a lot of restaurant dogs. By default, this was without a doubt the best I had in Iceland. I'm not sure it beats Pink's for flavor but the no wait line here vs. the hour and a half wait for a hot dog on a hot Los Angeles May night was definitely better. More than anything else, I feel stopping by here was something that had to be done to feel like I really had been to Iceland and I'm glad we could fit it into what was an extremely packed agenda. I'll go back for another next time I'm in town.