Weekends are for breaking the rules—for skipping square meals, for example, in favor of whatever junk food sounds good at the moment. Which is how my husband and I found ourselves at Green Lake’s Diggity Dog Hot Dog & Sausage Company one recent Saturday afternoon, gorging on quarter-pound wieners with the works. Our plan was simple: to sample everything in the neighborhood that is greasy, sugary, and otherwise bad for you, and then atone for our sins with a walk around the shores of the lake.
The crowded shop seemed to be a regular weekend destination for many neighborhood residents, and it’s not hard to fathom why. Diggity Dog’s menu ranges from the eponymous quarter-pound, all-beef classic, to linguiça and andouille sausages, to dogs made from turkey, chicken, and even soy ($2.45–$4.75). All come nestled into a soft, cornmeal-dusted white bun, which is exactly as it should be.
Meanwhile, those who believe, as I do, that a hot dog is primarily a condiment delivery system will be in heaven: Diggity Dog’s condiment bar has ketchup, sauerkraut, shredded cheese, minced onions, both sweet and dill pickle relish, chili, a half-dozen kinds of mustard, and various other potions in an array of squeeze bottles for customers to pile on at will. Only grilled onions could make it better.
We ate our dogs outside at one of the rickety plastic sidewalk tables, sipping Diggity Dog’s pitch-perfect lemonade ($2.45): Sweet enough to gulp, tart enough to refresh, it had been squeezed before our very eyes inside. Glancing up, we noticed the sign for Mighty O Donuts across the street, and suddenly our wandering had renewed purpose.
Our dogs dispatched, we meandered down toward Green Lake to turn our junk food into fuel. Of course, as with many things diet-and exercise-related, this turned out to be pure self-delusion. Our walk around the lake burned roughly as many calories as are found in one of the donuts we planned to eat at the end of it. (To do away with the whole menu, we’d have needed to add two laps around the lake at a brisk jog, plus another lap on Rollerblades.)
But as we fell in among the walkers on the lakeshore path, I discovered another benefit to our activity: we had become part of a great human carnival, a mass of people of all shapes, sizes, and colors circling in both directions. Not to mention the dogs—half of them goofy looking, half impossibly beautiful. Being in the middle of it all made me, quite simply, happy.
If Green lake is a carnival, then Spud Fish & Chips is its House of Mirrors: here soft drink refills are free but ketchup will cost you (17 cents). We got the short end of that deal, opting for onion rings ($2.75) to follow our hot dogs.
The rings, which come in a paper boat wrapped in butcher paper, were light and crispy (like good tempura) full of onion flavor and bursting with saltiness. We ate them afoot, passing a kaleidoscope of children’s soccer games on our way back to the lake. Almost everyone else on the lakeshore path wore workout clothes and serious expressions, and no one was eating but us. There was hardly so much as an iced latte to be seen.
Past the boathouse where in spring and summer you can rent paddleboats (one hour would be roughly enough time to burn off an order of onion rings if you are energetic about it), the path got suddenly quiet, and we met only a few scattered walkers and some ducks. By this time, we’d worked up a thirst, which we slaked at Bluwater Greenlake with a couple of pints of Stella Artois ($4). This beer is better on tap, as it’s served at Bluwater—a clarity of flavor replacing the bottled version’s slight skunkiness—and ideal after physical activity.
Crossing a tree-shaded patch of grass, we came upon a fencing club, the more expert members instructing the less experienced ones. Out on the lake, a sailing lesson was under way. Everyone else was improving themselves, and we were on our way to a third course of junk food. It was glorious.
“Mighty O!” trumpeted my husband at random intervals, as we rounded the western side of the lake. I swear that the closer we got, the faster he walked. But we arrived to find the chairs upside down on the tables, the big, gleaming espresso machine abandoned: Mighty O had closed early that day.
Unable to get doughnuts out of our minds, we returned on a weekday afternoon for another lap around the lake. This time, we managed to make it to Mighty O before closing—about five minutes before, as it turned out. What our experience lacked in leisure, though, it made up for in price: doughnuts were half off (just 46 cents apiece), and there was still a wide selection available.
All of Mighty O’s doughnuts are organic and vegan, which might call into question their status as junk food in some quarters. Certainly, these are grown-up doughnuts, without the tooth-aching sweetness of many mass-produced brands. The French Toast doughnut was satisfyingly cakey, topped with a generous powdering of cinnamon. The Peanut Butter Cup doughnut had a thick, creamy peanut butter frosting atop a subtly flavored chocolate doughnut. I’d walk miles for these treats—2.8 miles, to be precise.
Diggity Dog Hot Dog & Sausage Company, 5421 Meridian Ave. N., 206-633-1966. Spud Fish & Chips, 6860 E. Green Lake Way N., 206-524-0565. Bluwater Greenlake, 7900 E. Green Lake Dr. N., 206-524-3985, www.bluwaterbistro.com/gl-start.htm. Mighty O, 2110 N. 55th St., 206-547-0335, www.mightyo.com. GREEN LAKE.
