With hot dogs, it's about the venue as much as the sausage. Urban chaos and street noise seem as essential a condiment as mustard. You get both at the Dog House, a corner shack abutting Long Beach's busy Second Street. The windows are as huge as those holding back the waters at the Aquarium of the Pacific. The doors are kept open. You're practically breathing exhaust fumes when you sink your teeth into dogs that snap and spurt juices. All sandwiches—though uniformly tubular in shape thanks to a crackle-crusted, sesame-seed-covered hoagie-like roll—feature sausage varieties of different sizes, hues and spicing intensity. This, of course, can also be said of those harried pedestrians you'll see through the windows.
