Francheezie: Yet Another Chicago Hot Dog

Should We Add This To The Chicago Sandwich Canon?

I’ll be honest, when I saw that Wikipedia claimed the Francheezie was a Chicago thing, I was skeptical. I could not have named a single restaurant that carried a Francheezie on its menu. And with the hot dog culture that Chicago has, it doesn’t make sense for a Chicago hot dog stand to serve the Francheezie.

So that we’re all on the same page, a Francheezie is a hot dog that’s been slit open, stuffed with cheese, wrapped in bacon, and deep fried. And like I said, it doesn’t make sense for a Chicago hot dog stand to sell one. They don’t tend to carry bacon, for one. And the better hot dog stands use natural casing hot dogs that are more expensive than standard hot dogs. That natural casing gives the best Chicago dogs, which are generally steamed or simmered rather than grilled or fried, the snappy texture that is the signature of a good Chicago dog more than anything, more than the dragged-through-the-garden condimentation, more than the steamed poppy seed bun, more than the angry refusal to consider ketchup. Wrapping a natural casing dog in bacon and deep frying it seems like covering up the natural casing dog’s best feature. But I put it on the List and figured I would investigate when the time came.

The time came this month, and I still didn’t know much if anything about the Francheezie. I know that my mom, a Chicago native who grew up in Englewood and then Burbank, used to make something similar for us when I was a kid. Her version was baked instead of fried, and used cheap, casingless hot dogs, the kind you get for kids who don’t know any better. Sometimes she stuffed the hot dog with onions instead of cheese–a less kid-friendly variant that was certainly not juvenile Jim’s favorite–but most of the time it was bacon wrapped around hot dog wrapped around cheese just like the Francheezie describes. Mom never called it a Francheezie, though she admits that hearing the word “Francheezie” brings up images of making those.

But my friend Chris, replying to the monthly roundup post we do every month wherein we list what we’ll be writing about, had this to say about the Francheeze:

I’m fairly certain the Francheezie was something that was popular in Chicago in like the 60s or something—I would see it (and order it) on menus at old person restaurants when I first moved there and it kinda slowly disappeared even from those.

Another friend, Tribunal contributor Brian concurred with Chris’ assessment:

I’m totally in the same boat. I used to see them regularly at “old person restaurants.” Golden Olympic in Evanston and Big Top on Higgins Rd are *both* gone since COVID, but used to have them. I…know that I ate one at Ribfest like a decade ago, and I feel like it came from Chicago Joe’s booth, and that place is gone now, too.

Chris also mentioned Cambridge House, a now-defunct Greek diner on East Ohio in the Streeterville neighborhood, just off the Magnificent Mile, closed in 2019 so the building could be redeveloped into condos, and Dapper’s, an Avondale eatery that, while still in business, has removed the Francheezie from their menu.

So who does serve the Francheezie?

I found a few places. The map above has pins in blue to identify restaurants in the Chicago area that I have confirmed currently have Francheezies on the menu. There may be more–please do let me know if you’re aware of any, but these are the ones I have identified after several hours of searching and checking menus online. In yellow, I have marked 2 restaurants serving something they each independently call a “Frank N Cheese” that appears to be a Francheezie in all but name. And the red pins indicate the restaurants mentioned in the previous paragraphs, that served the Francheezie in the past but have either closed or removed it from their menus.

People who know the Chicago area will notice a definite pattern. Three of the restaurants are located downtown, 1 in southwest suburban Berwyn and there’s a “Frank N Cheese” on a menu down in south suburban Oak Forest, but for the most part, the Francheezie seems to be a north side / north shore thing.

And while I have only been to a few of the locations serving it, I have noticed a pattern. They tend to be “family restaurants,” the kinds of places that serve breakfast “all day” but close by 3pm. The kinds of places with naugahyde booths and striped awnings, with maroon and cream color schemes. The kinds of places that people go to when Denny’s is too far away and IHOP has too many foreign-sounding dishes.

Y’know. Old person restaurants.

Francheezies in their Natural Habitat

The first Francheezie I ate in the wild this month, I had at Pittsfield Cafe in downtown Chicago, in the lobby of the Pittsfield Building at the southeast corner of Washington and Wabash.

Of all the waitresses from whom I ordered a Francheezie this month, the waitress at Pittsfield Cafe, though otherwise very nice, was the most visibly and audibly tired of my shit before I even opened my mouth. I had intended to ask her if she knew anything about the history of the restaurant and the dish, and how people normally ordered their Francheezies, but intimidated by the weight of her ennui, I simply asked for one with mustard, relish, and onions. I could tell immediately that I’d made a mistake, and she grudgingly conceded “I’ll get them to put relish and onions on it for you, but you can put the mustard on yourself,” as she indicated the condiments on the rail in front of me, a common serving method in this type of diner.

In fact, every place I ordered a Francheezie from this month had a similar setup, whether at the bar, a table, or in a booth.

It’s a small sample size. But this also appears to be a pattern. Francheezies tend to be served at the kind of place where, if you order a burger, they bring it to you disassembled, top bun off, salad on plate, ketchup and mustard on the table, for you to dress as you like.

Though sometimes the condiment caddy only contained ketchup, no mustard at all. Surely I was not intended to put ketchup on my hot dog? Not in a Chicago area diner?

In any case, I gathered after the fact that the Francheezie is generally served plain, on a toasted bun, with potentially some lettuce, tomato, and pickle on the plate and the condiments on your table, as you’d get with a diner burger. But my Francheezie at Pittsfield Cafe came adulterated in the manner I’d specified instead.

The Pittsfield Cafe bun was not toasted, not to any noticeable extent, though like most every other Francheezie I had this month it did come on the standard Chicago poppyseed bun.

The hot dog was of the jumbo, casingless variety, unremarkable apart from how crisply bronzed both it and the bacon were by their bath in hot oil. What cheese remained in the slit cut along its length, partially held in by its bacon bandaging, was negligible. The fries, an add-on option at Pittsfield Cafe, were crinkle-cut and nothing special, and the Francheezie was served with a pickle spear and a plastic ramekin of coleslaw on the side.

It was–look, it was an overcooked hot dog wrapped in crisply browned bacon with an undetectable amount of cheese in a bun. Frankly, the onions and relish were its redeeming features. But I wonder, if I hadn’t specified those condiments, would it have come as the other ones I ordered this month did, with lettuce and tomato on the plate in addition to the pickle and coleslaw?

This particular specimen was delivered to the table at Sanders Family Restaurant in Skokie.

Again, we have a jumbo casingless commodity hot dog, deeply browned and shriveled from deep frying, wrapped tightly in thin bacon that did not manage to retain an appreciable amount of cheese as it was fried. More interesting at Sanders was their signature open-face sandwich called a “Krisper,” consisting of a Chicago-style French roll, the kind an Italian beef sandwich is served in, splayed out and covered in meat (I chose roast beef), cheese (I chose pepperjack), onions and peppers, and toasted hard under a salamander until the onions and peppers are well-browned and the bread has crisped up nicely.

I would order the Krisper again. I did order the Francheezie again, but at a different restaurant. According to Taste Atlas, the best Francheezies “in the world (according to food experts) are served at the following three Chicago-area locations:

• The Bagel Restaurant and Deli, in the Lakeview neighborhood
• Mother Hubbard’s Sports Pub in River North
• Connie’s Family Restaurant in Berwyn

Now, the Bagel is essentially a Jewish deli with an “old person restaurant” vibe, and Mother Hubbard is a family-friendly sports bar in the touristy River North area. I don’t think I’d have found any surprises at either. Nor did I at Connie’s, but it was the easiest of the three for me to get to on a random Sunday in December. Their Francheezie, like the others, was served with salad components separate and a thimbleful of coleslaw. It. came with fries, and soup as well–there were 2 options and I chose the French Onion soup–“not the baked kind,” my server clarified, served with croutons floated in it but without the coating of melted cheese.

Unlike the others, the Connie’s version had clearly visible cheese. This was not a sliced cheese–it appeared to have originated in a liquid or semi-liquid state, Cheese Whiz or something similar perhaps. But the cheese was still present, perhaps due to the hot dog’s double-layer wrapping of bacon, which left an uncooked inner bacon layer.

I am beginning to see why restaurants have stopped serving the Francheezie. It is unwieldy and difficult to master, requiring a delicate and near-impossible balance between cooking the bacon and evaporating the cheese. The resulting product is often just not very good. It might appeal to a child (one whose parent or guardian doesn’t balk at feeding them something cheese-stuffed, bacon-wrapped, and deep-fried) but the children who once enjoyed them, 50 or 60 years ago, are more likely to order a grapefruit and cottage cheese these days. We have become the old people these restaurants serve.

A Homemade Version

Full disclosure: I am not particularly excited to drop a hot dog, bacon-wrapped and cheese-stuffed or otherwise, into boiling oil. I acquired the requisite fixings but inspiration lagged in coming.

However, it occurred to me that this might be an excellent chance to use the air-fryer. One complaint I sometimes have about things that have been cooked in the air-fryer is that they are a bit dry on the surface, lacking that residue of hot oil that traditional frying methods would leave. In this case, we are frying a fatty cheese, inside a fatty sausage with fatty bacon wrapped around it. I don’t believe we have to worry about it lacking in rendered fat.

My attempts have been clumsy at best. After seeing my own bacon-wrapping skills, I can admire the tight wrap achieved by the pros at the various restaurants I visited this month. But these hot dogs were slit open and filled with cheese all the way to the ends, while the bacon was usually a single piece tightly wrapped around the middle of the sausage, leaving the ends open. Since my goal was to retain more cheese, I used a bit more bacon–1.5 to 2 pieces per dog–and wrapped all the way to the ends.

And I was at least somewhat successful in that goal. You can see some melted cheese still retained at the end of the hot dog above, though less than I’d have liked, and what was left slowly dripping onto the plate. This took 18 minutes at 370° Fahrenheit in the air fryer, flipping the hot dog twice during the cook. The bacon was perfect, the hot dog was OK, but the cheese retention less than ideal.

Mom Knows Best

So I went back to basics, and made them the way Mom used to make them for me–in the oven. I even made one with the onion in it instead of cheese. These were baked in the oven on a rack over a cookie sheet for about 25 minutes at 400° Fahrenheit. The bacon didn’t get quite as brown as I’d have liked, though it was crisp and fully cooked. The cheese mainly stayed trapped inside the hot dog, bubbling up through the bacon in places but fully present and oozing cheesily out the end as I bit into it.

And you know what? I liked the one stuffed with onion instead of cheese the best of all. I guess eventually we put aside childish things and become the old people these restaurants were made to serve.