Huntington Hot Dog Joint: 5th Ave. Dairy Queen

As Stanton so thouroughly proved last September, many Dairy Queens in West Virginia put their own unique spin on their hot dogs by peppering up their coney sauce, grilling the weenies, or doing something to distinguish their dawgs from the DQ five miles up the road.

The Dairy Queen on 5th Ave in the Highlawn neighborhood of Huntington is not one of those DQs.

Honestly, I was tempted not not write a review at all for the joint and instead just list some links to past reviews of sub-standard DQ dogs and let our smart and savvy reader base figure out what I was trying to say. But, after checking my contract, I learned in the fine print that if I should ever write a half-arsed review I would have to wear a T shirt that reads "Charleston deserves 7 delegates and Don Nehlen doesn't eat only apple sauce while playing Scrabble because he has absolutely no problem with choking during games." In order to avoid breaking the 9th Commandment (8th in Catholicism) and to get paying for all of that lettering, I will instead give a real review a go.

Basically, the dog suffered from having the same corporate-issued weenie and sauce that DQ imposes on its franchisees. Although the 5th Ave DQ advertised a new all-beef weenie that was 25% larger than before, the upgrade was barely noticeable at all. I guess if anything, it was like getting a hot dog from the Phillips Academy cafeteria instead of Richwood High School's lunch room (props to Oncee). Industrial grade all the way. Same for the sauce: you could almost taste the aluminum from the freshly-opened can that it had been resting within for months.

All was not lost, however. The grilled New England-style bun was a nice touch and the slaw was actually quite good, if not entirely dissimilar to Ballard's slaw.

Overall, the 5th Ave DQ gets 3 weenies. Not too bad if you are already going there for Blizzards and Moolattes, but not by any means a destination dog. This rings especially true considering that Stewart's Original is three blocks to the west and a Sam's is two blocks to the east.