INdulge: This beautiful, messy hot dog is the best thing I ate in Indy this week

Indianapolis Star

5 days ago

Last year I set a personal record in terms of hot dog consumption.
I downed dogs at home, slammed sausages at neighborhood cookouts and gobbled glizzies at baseball games. On a summer trip to Nashville, after a perfectly filling dinner at a charming tiki bar, my girlfriend and I swung by a Publix and bought ingredients to make hot dogs in our Airbnb, as I was simply fiending for a frankfurter that night.
And yet, amid all my wiener wandering last summer, nothing quite compared to:
I don't usually spend my Sunday evenings standing out in the pouring rain on the corner of a gas station parking lot, but there are concerningly few things I wouldn't do for a good hot dog — like, for example, the Venezuelan dog from Gimi Hot Dogs and Burgers.
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Gimi is a food truck that typically operates from 6 p.m. to midnight Thursday through Sunday outside the BP station at 3355 Moeller Road. Among the mobile eatery's multicultural menu, no item shines quite as bright as the subject of this week's INdulge.
While there's no exact recipe for Venezuelan-style hot dogs, vendors have historically agreed upon a few core ingredients: onions, shredded cabbage, some form of crumbly cheese and the dish's distinguishing topping, a scattering of fried matchstick potatoes.
With that loose blueprint, Gimi employs a spongey white roll that cradles a turkey sausage (perfectly fine by me, if nontraditional) that is wrapped in bacon, a carryover from the Sonoran hot dog popular in northwest Mexico and Arizona. The food truck uses parmesan as its cheese of choice and christens the prodigious payload with healthy zigzags of mustard, ketchup, mayo and an avocado-based tartar sauce called guasacaca. A tiny Venezuelan flag staked through one end of the sausage and a shovelful of crinkle-cut fries complete the meal ($10).
The impressively load-bearing bun, steamed soft and chewy, offers little resistance en route to the faint pop of a bacon-sheathed sausage, the vegetal crunch of cabbage and potato slivers that crackle apart between sauce-smeared mouthfuls.
The guasacaca's combo of mayo and tartar sauce add an acidic tang, while the neon-yellow mustard delivers a nice kick without the canker sore-level zing found in some carelessly assembled dogs. The ketchup brings a mild, pleasant sweetness. Though I typically omit the red stuff, the taboo condiment gets a rare pass from me in this case.
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Somehow, the multitextured traffic jam manages to (mostly) stay together on the bun. It's a remarkable feat of culinary craftsmanship, which feels sort of insane to say about any hot dog given the food's history.
Hot dogs are direct descendants of the frankfurters and wieners that reached America between the 17th and 19th centuries via Central European immigrants. In the early 1900s they quickly became the preferred lunch of poor American workers reaping the labor of even poorer American workers.
The first mass-market hot dogs were made in the United States' largely unregulated meatpacking plants, where sanitation standards and workers' protections were effectively nonexistent. Whatever stomach-turning mystery meats you joked about being in the school cafeteria hot dogs with the other kids at your lunch table very well may have occasionally made it into those turn-of-the-century tube-steaks.
Upton Sinclair's 1905 novel 'The Jungle' is widely credited for exposing the dire meatpacking workplace conditions and triggering the passage of the Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906. Sinclair was less successful in his calls for widespread solidarity among the United States' working class; the meat industry remains one of the nation's largest employer of both documented and undocumented immigrants, many of whom earn piecemeal wages to work in less-than-stellar conditions.
Despite knowing this, through some quirk of the psyche and stomach I have managed to consume untold numbers of hot dogs over the years, including a fully dressed foot-long unit that I ate for lunch at an amusement park about five hours before I stood in that downpour for my Venezuelan dog (it was a busy day, wiener-wise).
If you, too, have personal reservations about mass-produced meats but not quite enough scruples to refrain from the particularly tasty ones, I can't recommend Gimi's Venezuelan-style hot dog enough. It's an overstuffed ode to one of the United States' favorite degenerate delicacies and a reminder that there's still a wide world of excellent hot dogs out there to try — sometimes you just have to find the right parking lot.
What: Venezuelan-style hot dog, $10
Where: Gimi Hot Dogs and Burgers, typically open 6 p.m. to midnight Thursday through Sunday at 3355 Moeller Road. Call [phone] or visit instagram.com/gimihotdogsandburgers for updated hours.
In case that's not your thing: The mighty Venezuelan dog, understandably, isn't for everyone. For a more pedestrian experience, try Gimi's cheeseburger ($11), boneless chicken wings ($10) or grilled shrimp tacos ($10 for two). But Gimi's calling card is its regional twists on popular American dishes, like the truck's Hawaiian burger (classic cheeseburger with grilled pineapple, $13) and Mexican hot dog (bacon-wrapped sausage with guacamole and other toppings, $10).