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Restaurant Review: Mischa’s $29 Hot Dog Is Obnoxious. It’s Also Lovable.
A highbrow-lowbrow stunt right out of Jeff Koons, it’s the star dish at one of the year’s most inventive restaurants.
- Mischa
- NYT Critic’s Pick
- ★★
- Closed
New Yorkers have talked about the $29 hot dog at Mischa more than any other new dish this year. It may be better known than Mischa itself, which opened in Midtown in April with an American theme that Alex Stupak, the chef and an owner, interprets freely and with a big pinch of Eastern Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean.
Considered as a public statement, the $29 hot dog is obnoxious, a flagrantly expensive lowbrow-highbrow stunt out of the Jeff Koons catalog.
If you can forget all this and just eat it, though, the $29 hot dog is glorious. It gets to you both on a mindless, lizard-brain level and through a sophisticated appeal to your mind. It’s “Barbie” and it’s “Oppenheimer.”
There is, first of all, a condiment tray. Except for ketchup, which Mischa correctly believes has no place on a hot dog, it includes all of the standards. Yellow mustard and green-pickle relish are made at Mischa with obvious respect for the old ways, unless for you the old way means buying them in a jar. Kimchi stands in for sauerkraut. Finally there is a Chinese chili crisp with bacon and pimento cheese that has the consistency of Cheez Whiz.
The last two condiments have a strange affinity for each other. Spoon the mustard, relish and kimchi into the bun and you have a from-scratch version of a Nathan’s hot dog. Dress it with the chili crisp and pimento cheese and you have a new way of eating hot dogs.
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