Can a hotdog joint serve fine food? It's an improbable question, and most folks would never consider it--until they walk into Hot Doug's on the near north side of Chicago. From the sidewalk, the building is unremarkable, a classic redbrick storefront. Like a sausage, it’s the stuff inside that counts, and in this modest kitchen you can get things on a bun available nowhere else in the universe.

Chicago lives for, and on, sausages. The tradition reaches back to the wursts, kielbasa, and bangers of the original European immigrants, who starred in Upton Sinclair’s meatpacking epic, The Jungle. And it continues today in the countless chorizo consumed by residents of Mexican descent.

Hot Doug’s is neither the busiest hot dog joint in the city (though it’s plenty busy, with lines running down the block on a good day) nor the oldest (having served its first dog in 2001, which makes it rather young; another local stand, Fluky’s, opened in 1929). But by all accounts it is the most interesting and eclectic. Hot Doug’s features a goji berry pheasant sausage topped with cheese-stuffed sweet peppers as well as a Moroccan lamb sausage called merguez with harissa, a chili paste native to North Africa. It has served saucisse de Toulouse with anchovy aioli and Fromager D'Affinois. You can also order a regular dog, preferably in the delightfully low-brow Chicago style: chopped onions, yellow mustard, sweet relish, sport peppers, pickle spear, tomato wedges, and celery salt on a poppy-seed bun.

The owner, maitre’d, creative director, and namesake of Hot Doug’s is Doug Sohn, who has short, gray-peppered hair and thick plastic glasses. He tends to wear t-shirts and speak directly, with frequent sardonic asides. Before he became a sausage impresario, Sohn worked as a cookbook editor. After a coworker had a bad hotdog, he, Sohn, and several friends decided to canvas local hot dog stands. About 40 lunches later, Sohn had tasted enough to believe that he could open an uber-dogstand, one that combined the best traits of each restaurant. He had never thought of opening a restaurant of any sort until then. The stand also provided a way for Sohn to pursue his wilder aspirations for sausage. “I went to culinary school and have worked in restaurants and done high-end stuff,” he explains. “People ask me, ‘Now you’re selling hotdogs?’ And I’m like, ‘What’s the difference? Cooking is cooking.’”

Sohn has become something of a folk hero of late: To date, he is the only person to be cited for serving foie gras, which Chicago’s city council banned in April 2007. Sohn served it in a Sauternes-and-foie-gras duck sausage, for which he charged $7.00. He had to pay a $250 fine and faced constant hassling if he did not heed the ban. The city’s inspectors seized the offending foie gras and stuck it in the restaurant’s deep freezer, the better to preserve the evidence. Sohn is unrepentant, but he has stopped selling the pate, though he still eats it elsewhere.

There is something bracingly vital about a sausage, about the snap of the skin and the density of the ground meat. Many of the dishes at Hot Doug’s echo the European sausages that inspired the hot dog itself. Sohn got the idea to cook his fries in duck fat at a French bistro. “I first saw it at La Tupina’s in Bordeaux—an open woodburning fireplace. On the center of it was a big cauldron of duck fat,” he recalls. In return, Europeans have noticed this little Chicago storefront with continental influences. Hot Doug’s was recently discovered by the British, German, and Norwegian press, which recommended it to their readers abroad. When tourists come to Chicago for fine dining, they’ll graze its four-star establishments first: Alenea, moto, Charlie Trotter’s. Then they’ll hit Hot Doug’s afterward. “Apparently, we’re on that list,” Sohn admits.

Most of Doug’s sausages are made within five miles of the restaurant. “We work with a sausage maker [Chicago’s Columbus Foods] who makes a lot of them for us based on our concepts,” says Sohn. “[I tell them] ‘Here’s the flavor components I like,’ maybe the meat that’s in there, and they will develop the recipe from there.” It often takes several rounds of experimentation and tasting to get what Sohn wants, as was the case when he set out to develop a new pork-garlic sausage. “The first time we got it, I was like, ‘It tastes good, but I taste the meat and then the garlic. I want it the other way around.’ [I told him to] literally double the garlic. They thought I was crazy. Then they did it, and I was like, ‘We’re close—put a little more garlic in.’ Now it’s almost a third garlic, the sausage.”

Sohn loves to recreate established dishes on hotdog buns, almost as parodies. “We have a bacon sausage,” Sohn recounts. “I do it as a BLT with avocado mayonnaise, lettuce, and tomato. Then I was in Alsace in February and ordered one the classic dishes of Strasbourg, the tart flambé, which is almost like a thin-crust pizza with like a crème fraiche, caramelized onions, and bacon. So I came back and did bacon sausage with crème fraiche, caramelized onions, and Muenster cheese. It was a little play on the tart flambé.” It should come as no surprise that Sohn has also developed a corned-beef sausage that he tops with Swiss cheese, sauerkraut, and Russian dressing as if it were a Reuben sandwich. He calls it the Teuben. (The man loves hot-dog puns.) Sohn is now eyeing an even more ambitious sausage: a lobster dog, to be served with lemon crème fraiche and caviar.

“Worst case scenario,” he muses, “if I don’t sell any, yeah, I got a lot of lobster sausage for myself. I don’t see any downside.”