Tasha Does Tulsa.

It’s happened to everyone at least once: Someone takes a picture right as you sink your teeth into something messy, something with resolve and fight.

Something that has a tendency to drip down the chin. Or create a veritable goatee of deliciousness on our faces. Or make us look like we’re chewing on a bail of hay.

It happened to my husband and me when we stopped in to try The Junkyard Dog, in southeast Tulsa just north of 61st and Mingo.

We’ve been curious about The Junkyard Dawg since it opened a few months ago. Every time we drove by, which was usually early in the morning or after five, the parking lot was vacant and the dining room looked desolate from the street side of their windows. We’d heard it was a locally owned business, and we had our fingers crossed that this little place, hocking a collection of quick-and-dirty hot dogs and sandwiches, would go ahead and make it through, even if traffic seemed slow for now.

Then we stopped in for lunch.

Everything became clear: The Junkyard Dawg is the place to be for the midday meal in this part of town. The line to order, fast-moving through it was, stretched through the dining room and out the door the entire time we were there.

We were so relieved to see the place packed. But more than that, we were hungry.

Who doesn’t love a hot dog? That’s what the folks at The Junkyard Dawg bet on when they opened their doors. Like Marilyn Monroe, bologna and apple pie, the hot dog is sacred Americana. At this place you can dress up a dog in just about any way you can imagine. The menu ranges from the T-Town Pup, a traditional coney, to items like The Yardbird, a chicken sausage dog, and The Hooch, a bratwurst sausage dog, all generously stacked with cheese and veggies.

Prices range from a buck and a half for a loaded coney to about $5 for their huge sandwiches – a pretty good deal if you ask me, even during these days when the dollar menu seems to lord over south Tulsa lunch options.

And the add-on toppings? Oh, baby. Think full garden, full chili bar, full pickle bar, full everything, all to make your wildest, dirtiest, craziest hot dog dreams come true.

And get this: If you order chili or hash, you get to eat your meal out of a dog bowl.

Cute, right? What kid (or kid at heart) wouldn’t get a big kick out of that?

Down, boy. This is The Junkyard Dawg’s namesake menu item, a seven-inch, all-beef hot dog topped with red mustard, spicy chow chow (a.k.a. chili) grilled onions, shredded cheddar cheese, bacon and a little something called Axle’s sauce.

We adopted it. We named it. We gave it a loving home.

We also grabbed an order of the special that day, the Hash Wednesday.

Get it? Hash Wednesday?

Penance! Penance!

The best accompaniment to this most glorious of recipes for a downhome case of heartburn? A root beer and a bag of crunchy Cheetos, duh.

Mmm…a hot dog tastes so much better with Cheetos-orange fingertip smudges all over the bun.

Back to the whole being-photographed-while-eating thing.

Isn’t it just the worst? It’s almost as bad as being photographed mid-sneeze. Or at the bar when you’ve had one (or four) too many.

Not that I would know anything about this.

But I mean, you can’t control how your face twists and contorts as you try to choke back a bite of something like a loaded hot dog or a dog bowl full of cheesy, chili-covered, jalapeno-stacked hash.

And then to have the photographer not only not have the decency to delete the photo, but then upload it to Facebook.

And then tag it so God and everybody can see photos of you with your eyes closed and your mouth half-open and a little piece of food stuck to your lip.

It’s not fair, I tell you. There should be a law against it.

Especially when photos like these end up on a local blog.

Where there is no untag button.

Because this here is the wild west, baby. You don’t get no stinkin’ untag button here in the blogosphere.

How does that feel, cowboy? The revenge of the computer nerds, I mean. You look like you could use a beer.

I just hope my cowboy is still speaking to me now that I’ve posted candid camera-style photos of him eating a hot dog on the Internet. On a blog. Where, if you’ll recall, there is no untag button.

I’ll let y’all know about that as soon as I do. But in the meantime, brave the line (it really does move quickly – we went from door to register in about 5 minutes) and see what you can come up with at The Junkyard Dawg.

And if you’re really, really brave, post photos of yourself chowing down in the comments section of this post. Give us all something new and chili-smeared to behold.

The Junkyard Dawg
Where: 6011 South Mingo Road
When: Monday-Saturday, 10am-9pm
Call: (918) 893-4663
Web: thejunkyarddawg.com

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