Charleston HDJ Review - The Village of Otto

I have been driving past this little place on Pennsylvania Avenue for as long as I can remember, and for as long as I can remember I have wondered why it was named "The Village of Otto." I also wondered exactly what it was: It looks like a bar, but who ever heard of a bar named "Village of" anything?" People have told me that, yes, it is a bar, but those same people confessed to having never been there. So still I wondered.

On a recent trip up I79, I looked over and saw a new sign on the building that said "Hot Dogs $2.00." "Finally," I thought, "an excuse to go inside the bar." Now in the interest of full editorial disclosure, there was a time in my life that I needed no excuse to go into a bar, but these days I am a teetotalling goody-two-shoes who requires further inducement. Hot dogs - even expensive ones - will usually do the trick.

So I rolled into The Village of Otto late on a recent afternoon and apparently had missed the lunch crowd. When my dining companion and I walked into the bar the only people we saw were the bartender/cook and a woman who was waiting on her car to be repaired at the garage next door. After we ordered $8.00 worth of hot dogs with everything (onions, chil and slaw) plus mustard and two cokes, we settled into place and became familiar with our surroundings. Two pool tables dominate the room and generations worth of liquor and beer mirrors and posters cover the walls. The bar is well stocked and a smokers cage out back overlooks the Elk River.

The hot dogs took a while to get to us, but once they did I immediately noticed that they were on grilled New England Style buns. The chili was tasty enough (not spicy) but the slaw was way over mayoed. It was as if someone dropped a few pieces of cabbage into a jar of Hellmans. OK, not really that extreme but seriously too much mayo. The taste, despite the mayo overload wasn't so bad. Deducting a half-point for the NES bun, I'll give The Village of Otto an average 3 Weenie rating.

Oh, and about the name: According to the bartender, there are two stories about the name: One was that the little section of Pennsylvania Avenue where it is located was in the 1940's a heavily German community, and the bar name is a tribute to that ethnicity. The other story is that it is named after Beetle Bailey's dog.

The mystery continues...