Top Dog Is Just as Good as You Remember

The Midnight Diners is a regular collaboration between KQED food editor Luke Tsai and artist Thien Pham. Follow them each week as they explore the hot pot restaurants, taco carts and 24-hour casino buffets that make up the Bay Area’s after-hours dining scene. This week, guest artist Briana Loewinsohn joins the excursion.

If you attended UC Berkeley, or spent any significant amount of time near campus, then Top Dog requires no introduction. Open since 1966, the original Durant Avenue location is just a slip of a no-frills hot dog joint, with a bar of self-serve condiments and toppings and a small counter where maybe three diners, tops, can stand shoulder-to-shoulder while housing some classic all-beef wieners. 

For generations of Berkeleyites, however, the place is magic. People always want to start with Chez Panisse when telling the city’s illustrious food history, but in its own way, Top Dog is just as much of a quintessentially Berkeley restaurant, with its jaunty wiener-in-a-top-hat logo, offbeat libertarian propaganda posters (“Discard Statism. Unbend the Knee!”) and gruff grill cooks who brook no bullshit. 

Top Dog has endured for all these years, through various controversies and nightmarish street parking, for one simple reason: The hot dogs themselves are so damn good. Especially when you walk into the shop at 2 a.m., when every other restaurant in the vicinity is closed, there isn’t a more beautiful sight than the Top Dog flat-top, which is always piled high with dozens of sizzling sausages — more than you would think is advisable to cook at one time. But those grillmasters know what they’re doing. For as long as I’ve lived in the Bay Area, packages of cold Top Dog franks have been easy enough to buy and cook at home. They just never taste as good as they do at the mothership.

There are 11 different sausages on the menu, each of them with their own brigade of loyalists. The original kosher all-beef dogs are, of course, unimpeachable, with that snappiness to their casing that’s at the heart of the restaurant’s almost-60-year legacy. If you eat pork, though? Allow me to recommend the garlic frankfurter, which boasts a 75/25 mix of beef and pork and fresh garlic in the sausage itself, resulting in the juiciest, most flavorful dog of them all.

Really, though, it’s hard to go wrong. The hot links are excellent, more akin to spicy frankfurters than the kind of thing you’d get a barbecue spot. If you’d like something a little softer and squishier, the bockwurst has your name written on it. And, with apologies to anyone from Chicago or New York, I’m convinced that Top Dog’s crusty, well-toasted sesame-seed French rolls might be the greatest hot dog bun of them all. They just have the perfect amount of airiness and chew.

The best thing about eating a Top Dog at 1 o’clock in the morning is the simplicity of the meal. The dogs don’t really need anything added, though a tub of the mild, creamy potato salad makes for a nice side. And the standard, serve-yourself condiments station, in its own way, stays true to the restaurant’s libertarian spirit. Want to drench your hot dog with ketchup like you’re a small child? No one will judge you here.

You would think that this slice of campus around Durant and Telegraph avenues would be a gold mine for after-hours deliciousness, but the options are surprisingly sparse. There’s Kingpin Donuts (a late-night legend in its own right), a couple of pizzerias, a boba shop — and, honestly, not much else of note. Gourmet sports bars, fancified Taco Bells, late-night coffee shops and “Munchie”-themed meal delivery services have come and gone and come again, but at the end of a long, hungry night, Top Dog is still the king. 

May it reign for many years to come.

Top Dog’s original Berkeley location is at 2543 Durant Ave. in Berkeley. It’s open Monday through Thursday from 10 a.m.–2 a.m., Friday 10 a.m.–3 a.m., Saturday 11 a.m.–3 a.m. and Sunday 11 a.m.–2 a.m.