Mike, The Hot Dog Guy - Freddie's Hot Dog Stand

A snail walks into a bar. The bartender says to the snail, “Get outta here, we don’t serve your kind.” The snail replies to the bartender, “I just want a drink.” The bartender responds, “You need to leave, we don’t want you here.” The snail begs, “Can’t you just serve me a drink?” The bartender then picks up the snail and hurls him out the bar window, as far as he can. A year later, the snail comes back into the bar and asks the bartender, “Now, why did you do that?” That’s what you can expect if you stop by the cart under the rainbow umbrella at Pearl and Broadway and buy a quick lunch from Mike, the hot dog guy. Good dogs. Bad jokes.

Mike Horowitz has been selling good hot dogs and telling bad jokes at this very spot since 1997. An estimated one million hot dogs over the course of 28 years. Probably at least as many bad jokes. The best hot dogs come with mustard. The ruined ones with ketchup. (Mike has an opinion on that.)

Standing on the same corner on the west side of Broadway on the bricks of the Pearl Street Mall, ten hours a day, seven days a week, for 28 years, Mike has seen a lot. Some bad. Mostly good. But don’t get him started with ketchup on hot dogs. Mike is from New Jersey. He knows better than that.

On a recent sunny April afternoon, I sat with Mike at his hot dog stand on the Mall. A gentle homeless woman named Amber slept on the bricks nearby. Mike knew her well and the cops left her alone. Another unhoused fellow was having a mental health episode in front of us.

The police detained him briefly, then let him go after he calmed down. The cops stopped by Mike’s stand to make sure everyone there was fine. We were. Life on the bricks moved on. Colorful, but safe.

Mike bought the hot dog stand in 1997 from the guy who started it in 1980, and whose name is still on the side of Mike’s cart: Freddie’s. Mike’s predecessor was Freddie Snalam, a British chap who was more interested in traveling the world than selling hot dogs on the newly established Pearl Street Mall. Answering a for-sale ad he saw in the Daily Camera in 1997, Mike bought the cart from Freddie, and the rest is history.

Mike says he hadn’t planned on selling hot dogs in Colorado when he was growing up in New Jersey. As a young adult, he worked for a decade as a blackjack and roulette dealer in Atlantic City. But Mike and his wife fell in love with Boulder on a trip here three decades ago. So, they picked up and moved.

Starting in Boulder as a tow truck driver for Marv’s Towing (“The only job I could get,” Mike recalls), the 1997 ad for Freddie’s hot dog cart on the Pearl Street Mall intrigued him. There were lots of bidders for Freddie’s successful stand, but Mike impressed Freddie the most. So, it was his. “I never dreamed that I would be doing this 28 years later,” Mike says. “But I love it.”

Over the course of one million hot dogs, Mike says he’s seen many changes on the Mall. “A lot of mom-and-pop businesses are gone,” Mike observes. “The rents are just too high.” Mike now finds it sad that those high rents and COVID have driven out so many office workers that were once the staple of his lunchtime traffic business. But, unlike most restaurants downtown many of which are still struggling, Mike estimates that his business has more or less recovered from the pandemic, although he says that sales are a little off this year, maybe because of the strained national economy.

Mike is proud of the fact that he sells the most economical lunch on the Mall. “I want to provide an affordable place to eat,” Mike says. He observes that, while his cost for hot dogs and buns has more than doubled during the 28 years he has run his stand, he has tried to hold the line on prices. A hot dog that sold at Mike’s cart in 1997 for $2.50 is only $4.00 today. That’s an annualized increase of less than two percent, well below inflation.

As I’m sitting there chatting with Mike, three girls from Boulder High School stop by the cart. They are recent transplants from Mexico, and they don’t speak much English. “Perros calientes?” Mike offers in his limited Spanish, heavy with New Jersey influence. No, the girls respond, they only want chips. Mike is happy to oblige, squirting hot sauce in the chip bags, as they instruct. Dogs, chips, and soda are what the cart’s menu offers. Simple and inexpensive. If you’re nice, Mike will throw in a joke. But there’s no guarantee that it will be good.

Being a Jersey boy, Mike is not shy about expressing his opinion about mustard vs. ketchup on a hot dog. “I would never, ever, ever put ketchup on my hot dog,” Mike says emphatically, although he’ll do it for others, if they insist. Mike offers all sorts of other toppings, ranging from relish, to onions, to pickles and peppers, to sauerkraut. And although he estimates that 60 percent of his customers ask for ketchup, Mike says that he will never yield in his opinion in the endless mustard vs. ketchup debate: “No matter what else you put on a hot dog, once you’ve put ketchup on, you’ve ruined it.”

One time, a woman stumped Mike by asking for a single hot dog, with mustard on one end and ketchup on the other. She ate the whole thing all at once. To this day, Mike doesn’t know what she really wanted.

In addition to your basic all-beef Vienna dogs, Mike offers several alternatives, including bratwurst and elk. A few years ago, Mike had on the menu a rabbit and rattlesnake hot dog combination, but his supplier stopped selling that. He’s not sure it was kosher anyway. Mike is at his stand on the west side of Broadway seven days a week. He says he rarely takes a vacation, and the few trips that he does are in the winter, when business on the Mall is slower. Mike guesses that he works 70 hours a week, but he clearly loves his job.

In the summertime, as many as three-quarters of his customers are tourists. Mike serves as Boulder’s unofficial convention and visitor’s bureau, telling visitors about sites they must see while they’re in town. And, of course, Mike knows everyone who works downtown, greeting each by name as they come by his cart, regardless of whether they buy a hot dog.

A fixture on Pearl Street, Mike has been in most of the movies filmed on the Mall over the last three decades, including in the opening scene of 2016’s Heaven Sent. Mike says he’s looking forward to serving hot dogs to all of the people who come to the Sundance Film Festival when it arrives in 2027. Particularly if they order their dogs with mustard.

With a wry sense of Jersey humor, Mike is quick with a quip or a joke as he doctors up a hot dog a customer has just ordered. In fact, Mike promised that anyone coming to his hot dog stand during the month of May will receive a free joke if they mention that they read about him in Bob’s newsletter article. But if Mike starts to do the one about the snail, tell him you’ve already heard it.

Interview Courtesy of Bob Yates.