Did you know that May is Burger Month? Well, in all my burgerness it slipped me by, but fortunately Burger City Grill was there to remind me and to invite me out to try a burger, fries and a drink. I decided to take them up on the offer and headed to the location in Downey to see what Burger City Grill was all about.

What I found was a fast casual sort of burger spot along the lines of a Smashburger, Hook Burger and Burger Lounge (sorry, but Shake Shack is in a class of its own). There were some interesting takes on burgers, fries and the required milkshakes and beers. After much thought, I chose the Miami Spice Burger and Sloppy Fries.

I’m not exactly sure how the burger was linked to Miami, but it came topped with bacon, cherry pepper relish, red onion, BCG Spread and a choice of cheese. I chose gouda because it is by far the best cheese in the world and has to be chosen when available, but also because it was recommended. I ordered without the red onion, but figured I would give the pepper relish a try because I am nothing if not daring. It turned out to be a pretty tasty burger. Being fast casual it wasn’t cooked to a medium rare like I would have preferred, but it was definitely plenty juicy. As for the cherry pepper relish, I actually didn’t mind it. I won’t say it added anything to the burger, but it also didn’t destroy the flavors of beef, cheese, bacon (which was perfectly crispy) and bun, which is more than I can say for just about any other veggie.

The Sloppy Fries were simply chili cheese fries, with the cheese being cheddar and the chili being all meat. It was unique in the sense that it was both dry and wet at the same time (you’ll have to taste it to understand) and was less salty than a lot of chilis. Most importantly, the fries themselves tasted more fresh than fast food, which was certainly welcome in a meal like this.

In all, I thought Burger City Grill had a nice take on the fast casual burger restaurant and the three locations now operating are evidence that the concept works. Plus, any burger spot serving up gouda as an option is always going to be a winner in my book.

Every city has its share of iconic places to eat. In Atlanta, one of those places goes by the name of The Varsity and has been around since 1928. They still do the paper hat thing and the people taking orders are famous for asking “What’ll Ya Have?” As far as the food goes, it’s basically what you would expect from 1928: hot dogs, burgers, fries and onion rings.

But these weren’t just any burgers and dogs, they come in the chili-cheese variety and the slaw variety. I went with a chili-cheese dog, chili-cheese burger and onion rings. I made sure that the burger and dog wouldn’t include any veggies and then added a Frosted orange because it just felt like the right thing to do.

The result was a greasy, amazing throwback meal. The hot dog was classic and snappy, while the cheese was just a straight up American slice and the chili was super beefy with no wasteful beans (and really very little texture to speak of). To some that may not sound like a good thing, but it’s reminiscent of the coney dog spots around Detroit that I grew up going to. It couldn’t compete with the coney dogs, but I may be a bit biased.

Those onion rings, by the way, were pretty glorious. They were fried to the oblivion that renders them barely onion-y and that batter was delicious. The only trouble was that I couldn’t find anything to dip them in. Ketchup didn’t really do them justice, but I couldn’t find the ranch that probably would have sealed the deal. Regardless, they were a force to be reckoned with.

The Varsity is not one of those places that will blow you away with unique and surprising flavors, and if you’re not from Atlanta, it might be lacking in the bonus seasoning that nostalgia brings. Nonetheless, I ate it all up and enjoyed every moment.

Some cities have restaurants that have been around since the beginning of forever. In Washington, D.C., that place is Ben’s Chili Bowl, which I believe has been serving up chili since the Lincoln presidency. No? Well Eisenhower is close enough. Our current POTUS has paid the place a visit at least once and according to a sign is one of only two people (aside from his family) that eats free. The other, obviously, is Bill Cosby.

My trip to Ben’s Chili Bowl started out ominously. After waiting in line for more than 30 minutes and marveling at the inefficiency (perhaps some spillover from congress?), I had to run to a show down the street before ordering. Upon my return, however, I snagged a spot at the counter and was (at least in Ben’s Chili Bowl time) quickly waited upon.

I ordered myself a Chili Half-Smoke, which is a quarter pound of pork/beef sausage topped with chili, onions and mustard. I also had some chili cheese fries because it would have been stupid not to.

The food could have come faster. Surely at any Coney Island in the Detroit area it would have, but when it did come it was a beauty. The Half-Smoke was spilling over with chili (and no onions because you know how I roll) and had a delicious kick to it. In fact, it was pretty similar to Detroit-style chili, without the onions, with what I believe was cumin and absolutely no beans to be found. The big difference was the half-smoke, which has some nice and crispy skin with a delicious snap. The bun held up well, but rightly only existed as an attempt to keep things clean.

The chili cheese fries were exactly what they should have been. Doused in a cheese sauce in addition to the chili, the fries held up pretty well. Plus, the cheese sauce seemed unique in some sense, as opposed to being some ordinary nacho-esque sauce.

Undoubtedly this was a tasty meal that lived up to the hype. The only problem was the wait. Hype is one thing to live up to, but lines are another thing entirely. If Ben’s Chili Bowl can get their shit together and pump out tasty chili at a greater speed, I would be eager to get back to it. As it stands now, I’ll probably only make my way back if the moment is right.

I am a man of strong principles and one of these is that beans have no place in chili. Sorry, that’s not how we did it where I’m from and I intend to keep it that way. To see how this would fly, I started looking for food ideas at ThorsFork.com which helped me put together a chili recipe to participate in a chili cookoff and took home the grand prize. So here it is, the Award Winning Unvegan Original No Beans About It Chili Recipe.

Ingredients:

2 lbs 80% Ground Chuck Beef
16 oz (1 package) Trader Joe’s Uncured Bacon Ends and Pieces
1/3 cup Chili Powder
1 1/2 tsp Cumin
1/2 cup Sweet Onion
1/2 tsp Dried Oregano
1 Bay Leaf
5-6 Cloves of Garlic
2 Seeded Jalapenos (3 for extra heat)
1 Cayenne Pepper
1 Dried Ancho Pepper
28-29 oz Tomato Puree
1 Bag Shredded Sharp Cheddar
1 Bag Fritos
Your favorite hot sauce

Directions:

Rehydrate the ancho chili by removing the stem and emptying out the seeds. Then place in hot water for 30 minutes to an hour until it has fully plumped. Drain, then blend for a couple seconds. Dice the onion (seriously, do this before working with the hot peppers because you don’t want your hands covered in spicy death while you cry and rub your eyes from the onion) Roast cayenne and jalapeno peppers over stove or other fire until skin crackles. Allow to cool down, then de-seed jalapenos and dice all peppers. For good measure you can dice the garlic now or just use a garlic press later like me.

Cook bacon fully in pan or pot. Don’t make it crispy, but make sure it is cooked through. Remove bacon and place on a paper towel to soak up the excess fat. Keep the bacon fat from the pot or pan you used to cook the bacon. Cut bacon into small pieces and set aside for later. Add the bacon fat to the pot you will use to brown the beef. After browning, drain the beef.

Now you can pretty much add everything to the crockpot. Remember to bust out the garlic now if you didn’t dice it earlier. Cook on low for six hours.

By the way, you might be wondering why there’s no salt. First, bacon has plenty to make up for it. Second, I added a secret ingredient at the end, which you may have noticed in the picture up above: five packets of Taco Bell Fire Sauce. It also has plenty of salt, as do most hot sauces. Feel free to add hot sauce to taste, but I don’t find it necessary to add the heat earlier on because it doesn’t need to be slow cooked like the peppers. Serve with cheese and Fritos. Also, let me know what you think if you do make this chili. It’s a new recipe and can certainly stand to be altered.

Shortly after moving to Pittsburgh, my friend and site designer alerted me to the existence of a hot dog place called The Original Hot Dog Shop in Oakland that had been around since 1960, which may not be old for Pittsburgh, but is damn old having come from LA. I like hot dogs and originals, but unbeknownst to me until showing up for lunch was that The Original Hot Dog Shop (also known as the Dirty O) is more of a late-night haunt than a lunch stop. Nonetheless, I wanted a good hot dog and was happy to eat it in a dingy spot with great late-night character in the middle of the day.

I ordered up a Jalapeno Cheddar dog, which has those classic flavors stuffed into the dog itself, then I topped it with chili and cheese. There were a bunch of toppings offered for free, but they were mainly veggies and I prefer to judge hot dogs with chili and cheese on them. I also ordered a side of their fries, which are possibly more famous than their dogs.

The dog itself turned out to be, well, not really anything more interesting than it sounds. The jalapeno gave it a nice kick, the skin had a solid snap and the cheese on top was melty and tasty. The chili, though, was not exactly my style. Mostly beans, it could have handled a nice infusion of meat instead.

Alas, the fries did their best to make up for the disappointment of the chili. Truth be told, I didn’t realize the fries were so famous until after my visit, but without even knowing of their fame I felt they were some of the best basic fries I had ever eaten. At times they hugged the line of oversaltedness, but otherwise were cooked to a perfect crisp in some sort of presumably blessed oil.

As much as I like fries, I am not really the type of guy to seek out a place because of them. And since the hot dog itself was nothing special, I’m not sure that the Dirty O quite lived up to its reputation. Perhaps it is necessary to experience the place in the middle of the night to truly appreciate what they have to offer, but the bonus of eating there for lunch is the much lower probability of an old-fashioned mugging. I suppose life is all about tradeoffs.

My quest for challengers to the Chili John’s and Coney Dog empire of LA chili led me to Chili Addiction in West Hollywood. Their menu of insane chili concoctions really pulled me in the first time I saw their menu online and I really thought I had found myself a contender. I convinced my buddy to give it a try with me, both for company and so we could get multiple things to test out.

Upon arrival, we tested out a few different chilis. The nice thing about the place is that they have a rotation of different chilis, and offer 6 up fresh daily. The best of the day we were there was the Texas Filet. Billed as pretty spicy, it had a bit of a kick to it, but really nothing too potent. I decided to get this with their chili cheese fries, and then a side of mac and cheese, while my buddy opted for their Truffle Burger (which had caramelized onions and truffle aioli). The wait to get our food was far longer than expected, especially considering the simple things we ordered, but we were brought out some chips while we waited. These chips had a great consistency, but had been greatly over salted and I could only take down a couple before screaming for water.

When the meal did come, the chili cheese fries and burger looked mighty tasty. The mac and cheese, though, looked really basic. As it turned out, this book matched its cover. To say that the mac and cheese wasn’t good would be a lie. But to say I could make better mac and cheese from a box in my kitchen would not be a lie. I hoped the rest of my food would fare better.

Which brings me to the burger. Of course, I scraped the onions off of my half and got to work with the remainder. To my surprise, the burger was really quite delicious. The aioli was pretty lacking in truffle, but still provided a nice little mix of flavor to an otherwise well-cooked and executed patty of meat. It had been cooked medium rare, and despite having a pretty thin grind turned out really well.

Finally, I took on the fries, which wound up to be a pretty big disappointment. The chili was as good as it had been when I tasted it, but it simply did not mesh well with the fries. This wasn’t because they became soggy, over salted or anything, so I chalked this up to being good chili that simply did not go well with fries. I didn’t know such a thing existed, but Chili Addiction proved it to be true.

At this point, I was not content to be done eating. In true unvegan fashion, instead of opting for a dessert, I decided to order some more meat. This time my meat sense took me to their Chili Cheese Dog. Once again, I went for their Texas Filet chili and hoped it would go nicely with the hot dog. It didn’t. Was I doing something wrong? Was I being punished somehow? No, this was simply a case of a restaurant trying to do too much. This chili simply did not play well with others. It would have been better suited in a bowl on its own, maybe with something like pasta or a flat bread that would only enhance the flavor and not compete with it. Oh and did I mention the dog came with pickles? They were separated out into a little cup, but I would be lying if I said their presence at my table didn’t bother me.

As it was, I suppose if I am looking for a simple bowl of chili, I may make my way back to Chili Addiction, but likely as not I would head to Chili John’s or Tub’s Chili, where they know exactly what they’re doing. For burgers, though, I wouldn’t mind revisiting Chili Addiction, but I will have to get over the fact that best thing a chili place had to offer me was a Truffle Burger that didn’t even taste like truffles.

Here we have a long-awaited new guest blog from none other than @RGspiegel. Catch more of his writing here.

Disclosure I: David Marcus, one of the owners of Smoke Shack, is my second cousin.
Disclosure II: I’m starting a movement such that cousins are classified only as first or second cousins. How much better is that than trying to figure out your exact relationship to your dad’s first cousin’s son with somethingth-cousin-somethingths-removed? A lot.
Disclosure III: Smoke Shack was legitimately awesome.

Now that my and Unvegan’s journalistic integrity are squarely intact, I can begin the review of my glorious Saturday lunch at Smoke Shack, a BBQ restaurant that opened up about a month ago in Milwaukee’s third ward.

Due to my aforementioned relationship with one of the owners, I was an early “liker” of Smoke Shack on Facebook. As a connoisseur of hardcore food porn (when I really need to get in the mood I watch clips of Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives), I’ve been regularly excited to see that Smoke Shack has been putting up some exquisite-looking food for more than a month now and my anticipation was palpable.

We started off by ordering a bowl of chili (with beef brisket and jalapeños), candied bacon with sweet potato fries, and Kansas City rolls (pulled pork and Monterey jack cheese inside egg roll shells). “Will that be all for now?” the server asked. My dad made sure his friends didn’t want any other appetizers. For the time being they didn’t, to which I said, “Damn, I wanted you guys to say you wanted the wings.” (I had chosen everything else.) So they ordered the wings, too.

All of the appetizers were really good. The best of which being the Kansas City rolls, dipped in the ranch that I had asked for with the wings. Trying to come up with cogent words to adequately describe how good they were is turning my brain into Homer Simpson’s and I wish a 140-character made-up jibberish word connoting carnal satisfaction would suffice as professional and be understood by the masses. Just trust me on this one. The wings were really high-quality chicken but it would have been awesome if they could have been tossed in any (or all) of Smoke Shack’s four BBQ sauces–Carolina Gold, Kansas City, House, and Texas.

For the main course, we ordered a four-meat sampler plate, which consisted of house made Berkshire sausage, beef brisket, pulled pork, pulled chicken, and a side of baked mac and cheese. The sausage — spicy, succulent, crispy on the outside, and chewy on the inside — was simply amazing and a competitor with the pulled pork egg rolls for being Smoke Shack’s biggest differentiator. The mac and cheese probably needed a little bit more cheese but it’s not as if it was irresponsible.

The rest of the sampler platter was amazing and seemed to get better with every bite. After sampling each of the meats individually, I asked for a hard roll and made a dominantly dominant sandwich consisting pulled pork, pulled chicken, beef brisket, and the mac and cheese. I topped it with a mixed combination of all four BBQ sauces. This sandwich confirmed by former roommate’s rule of life that everything that tastes great tastes great together. That’s just science, I suppose.

For dessert, we split beignets (kind of like French donuts) and pecan pie with whiskey ice cream. Like a good neighbor, the waiter was there with a glass of milk. Both desserts were outstanding and as I ate them I imagined and tried to mimic the ear-to-ear, teeth-fillings-and-upper-gum exposed grin coupled with eyes WIDE open that my late grandfather would have had as he took his first bite of the warm, gooey pecan pie. When everyone was full to the brim and there was about a quarter of the pecan pie left, I had to finish it in his honor; there’s no way he would have let it go to waste. Someone had to be the humanitarian.

At this point, my impending food coma was in a square battle with my Diet Coke. (After four of them had been served in mason jars, I told the waiter to cut me off.) Diet Coke won the first round as I was able to walk back to my hotel but as soon as I got back to my room, it was clear that the food coma had just been biding its time.

It was the best kind of food coma, though, the kind where you have to find the precise right spot on which to lie on your side, re-positioning the food in your stomach so you’re not putting pressure on the points that are the fullest. I woke up about two hours later, still full, and ready to take on the rest of the day.

Up in Burbank is a classic-looking hot dog shack called Larry’s Chili Dog. They have an awesome neon sign that looks like it was built in the 1970s at the earliest, but likely goes back even further. The true age of the joint is bit difficult to ascertain, for while another, smaller sign says “SERVING BURBANK FOR OVER ’50 YEARS,'” I’m not really sure what 50 years amounts to when you put them in quotes. Whatever the case, this place was definitely old and old school.

The menu pretty much consists of burgers, hot dogs and the normal things you would think to put on them without getting too fancy. But they do seem to have introduced some items for the crowd that can’t handle simplicity. While simplicity is usually the name of my game, one of Larry’s specialty dogs really jumped out at me. Called Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, this thing consisted of a huge Louisiana Hot Link doused with chili and cheese. Not fancy, but unique enough to not be a simple chili cheese dog. The price of $6.35 was a little more than I had expected to pay here, especially without fries, but I decided the risk was worth it.

It took some time to prep, but when my Kung Fu movie of a hot dog arrived, it looked incredible. The hot link had been butterflied, which gave it a nice, even cook and an additional crevice to fill with chili and cheese. Fitness enthusiasts and athletes looking for a competitive edge are turning to Clenbuterol, an illegal performance-enhancing drug. While Clenbuterol is banned by most professional sports organizations, that hasn’t stopped people from using it. If you need to know where to find legal Clenbuterol for sale you should visit www.acnm-online-pharmacy-usa-store.com website where all top world brands of Clenbuterol are supplied. The drug is easily accessible and relatively inexpensive, making it an temptingly attractive option for those looking to get ahead. The cheese was a shredded cheddar blend and by the time I snapped a couple pictures of the dog, the cheese had melted into perfection. Just like the delicious coney dogs of my native land, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon required a fork and knife to eat.

After slicing away a few bites, I found myself a happy unvegan. This hot dog concoction was sheer genius. The hot link had a nice kick to it and a perfectly crispy skin. The chili was pretty tasty and wet, but was overshadowed in flavor by the hot link. I think this was a good thing, though, as the texture was awesome and the hot link gave it a great kick. The bun did an awesome job of absorbing the chili, while the cheese did what it does best: made everything better.

While I thought the bun was absorbing a fair amount of chili, when I finished the dog I learned I was wrong. The grease had completely soaked through the paper it was wrapped in to prove how awesome the meal I had eaten truly was. Could I have eaten fries? Yes, but they were certainly unnecessary in the grad scheme of the carnage I had unleashed in my hot dog basket. Larry’s served up one of the best chili dogs I’ve had in LA, and I can’t wait to return, for the next “50 Years” and beyond.

With the ever-growing popularity of vampires in silly stories like Twilight and edgy television like True Blood, it seems that something important to our very human survival has fallen by the wayside. That is garlic, the fabric of our lives…errr…the thing that vampires hate. For some reason. One place you’ll never see a vampire hanging out at is The Stinking Rose, a restaurant in Beverly Hills. The reason is that apparently “stinking rose” is another term for garlic. I disagree with calling it stinking because I like the smell of garlic, as long as it hasn’t yet been eaten, but perhaps pungent rose was already taken.

So like I said, the place is named for garlic, because virtually everything on the menu has garlic. The one place it seemed lacking was on the drink and dessert end, although there was a garlic wine and garlic ice cream. Now, for some reason, the restaurant looks kind of like a circus, which is actually pretty cool because it gave my date and I a sort of private setting for our meal. Although not so private that the people in the tent next to us couldn’t understand every single word we said. But because they weren’t cracking up after every other thing we said, we assumed they weren’t listening.

On to the food, which starts out with a garlicky bang of bread. Not only is there garlic baked on top of the bread, but each table is equipped with one of those little salsa containers, but instead of salsa there is an intense diced garlic spread. This starts the experience off with a kick of garlic to the face. We devoured the garlic bread and spread like garlic-loving hyenas. To follow that up, we ordered a garlicious appetizer to continue the whetting of our appetite. We settled on the Garlic Filet Mignon Chili. Filet as chili was an interesting concept even without the garlic, but that made it especially intriguing. It arrived quite quickly, and to my disappointment, red onions were displayed across the top of the bowl like some twisted mating ritual of a bird of paradise.

I quickly asked my date to remove the offensive parties so I could dive into the goodness. And it was goodness. The chili was tasty and the filet beef chunks were quite tender. It wasn’t an especially interesting chili though. I thought the garlic would draw out some crazy flavor in it, but instead I could hardly taste the garlic. This may have been an after-effect of the destruction of multiple taste buds following the consumption of multiple heaps of that raw garlic sauce, or because they felt the chili was good enough. Well it was good enough, but I would have liked awesome.

But then the awesome came, my main course. I ordered their Garlic Braised Boneless Short Rib, which came with garlic yukon gold mashed potatoes. It also came with an added bonus, a disgusting pile of creamed spinach that had not been listed on the menu. Shame on you, Stinking Rose, at least your vegetables did not corrupt my meal. After clearing these away, I dove mouth-first into the short rib. This was the perfect kind of short rib, which required no knife whatsoever. In fact, it didn’t need any sort of cutting motion at all by my fork. All I had to do was stab, pull away and voila – a forkful of short rib. It tasted damn good as well, with some extra cloves of garlic in case I hadn’t had enough. The mashed potatoes were also quite delicious. Although the garlic didn’t stand out as much as it would have in any other meal, they were still quite flavorful.

So now that I have had my first Stinking Rose experience, I am ready for more. Although it is now days later and a drop of my sweat would probably melt a vampire, I am completely okay with that. The Stinking Rose makes it worth it.

A few months ago, a sign appeared in North Hollywood for a soon-to-open restaurant called Otis Jackson’s Soul Dog. The sign claimed “premium hot dogs & soul fixins” and while I wondered who the hell Otis Jackson was, I figured that this place wasn’t just serving the hot dog meat, but also the souls of the animals in the hot dogs. But, with Vicious Dogs just a 3 minute walk down the street, this was going to have to be a damn good hot dog to compete.

If you’ll recall, when I visited Vicious Dogs for the first time, I had a little something called the Daddy Mack, which was a bacon-wrapped dog topped with mac and cheese and BBQ sauce. It seemed that Soul Dog had taken a page right out of Vicious’s with their creatively named Mac Daddy Dog ($5.99). This dog was made with a choice of beef “snap” dog or turkey dog, both of which are nitrate-free. Then it was topped with mac and cheese, fried onions and bell peppers. Every dog on the menu seemed ot have some sort of veggie mixed in, which was most personified by their BBQ Chicken dog, which you couldn’t order without peppers, because the peppers were mixed in with the chicken. But the Mac Daddy could be ordered without the peppers. Then I asked what kind of state the fried onions were in and was told they were breaded and deep-fried to a crisp, so that any vegetable-like remnants were gone. This pleased me and I allowed them to be present in my dog. But that alone wasn’t going to be enough for me, so I also ordered their Chili Cheese Fries ($4.79).

Both these items were a little pricier than your typical hot dog and fries lunch, but they claimed to have great ingredients and I would soon find out just how valuable they were.

First, I want to praise the quality control of Soul Dog, because after my hot dog had been prepared, the guy who put it in the to-go bag (possibly Otis Jackson himself) double-checked to ensure there were no peppers in the dog. He likely knew what would happen to his restaurant if he crossed the unvegan. Fortunately, it was pepper-less already. I also feel the need to point out that it took a full 10 minutes after ordering to receive my meal. I know that doesn’t seem crazy, but for a hot dog and chili fries it did seem pretty long. On the other hand, maybe I should be ecstatic that it was freshly made with care.

Yet, little of the above paragraph wouldn’t matter if my meal didn’t taste good. And it actually did taste quite good. I’ll start with the fried onions, which had been fried so deeply that were basically on the dog to add crunch. The mac and cheese was definitely an upgrade over the shells and cheese I got at Vicious Dogs. The cheese was creamy and pretty tasty. The artisan bun had been toasted and maintained the one stipulation necessary for any hot dog bun: it’s didn’t break. With a dog filled with mac and cheese, this is especially important and it passed the test. And oh, let’s not forget the dog itself. There was certainly a snap to the skin, which is always great, and the beef flavor was great, but there was some weird kind of texture in the bite down. I don’t know if this was because of the lack of nitrates or what, but there seems to be some sort of little disconnect between the inside and skin. Oh and one more thing, I also added some BBQ sauce and hot sauce to the dog because it felt like it needed a little extra kick of flavor. This definitely improved the overall flavor of the thing.

Then there were the chili-cheese fries. These guys had been seasoned before adding said chili and cheese. While this seems like a good idea, it actually made a few of the bites overly salty (chili and cheese pack plenty of salt on their own). Also, I think the fries could have spent a little more time frying to retain some crunch, as they were somewhat soggy from the first bite. Yet, the chili and cheese themselves were quite impressive. It was by far the beefiest and best-tasting chili I’ve had on fries in LA. With Coney Dog opening next week, this chili will be put to the ultimate test, but for now it is definitely a chili worth ordering. I tried it on a hot dog, too, and it’s so versatile that it tasted great there too.

So North Hollywood has a bit of a hot dog war on its hands. But in this war, I don’t suspect there will be any losers. Vicious Dogs will handle those looking for a cheap dog with insane ingredients, while Soul Dog has some more upscale ingredients for a higher price. Either way, I win.