818 South Vista Avenue
Boise, ID 83705
Phone: 208.342.1199
818 South Vista Avenue
Boise, ID 83705
ph: 208-342-1199
stanshot
Press
"Stan's Charbroiled Hot Dogs, Boise" by Guy Hand
January 9, 2009 www.idahostatesman.comStan Linkowski, o
wner of Stan’s Char-Broiled Hot Dogs, has a thing for sauce. Nearly every hot dog stand in his hometown of Buffalo, N.Y., made a condiment called Texas Red Hot Sauce. Neither Texan nor particularly hot (a red hot is eastern slang for a hot dog), he says the sauces could nevertheless conjure greater customer loyalty than the dogs they dressed. Still, Linkowski found many too greasy, too spicy or too watery. But one sauce was just right. It became an obsession.Linkowski, a tall 70-year-old with a bushy white mustache and businesslike demeanor, doesn’t seem predisposed to obsession. Yet he spent decades and a bunch of money trying to get the creator of his favorite sauce to give up its secrets. “First time I approached him” Linkowski says, “I offered $750 for the recipe, and that was back in 1959. He didn’t want to talk to me.”
So Linkowski tried to tease out the ingredients himself. “I thought it had curry, I thought it had cinnamon, I thought it had marjoram,” he says. Still, he couldn’t get the recipe right. He took a sample to a lab for analysis. That didn’t work either.
Of course, Linkowski also had a life to lead, so he put his quest for sauce on hold. He left Buffalo for the Air Force, then worked in the restaurant trade in Washington, Arizona and Montana for 25 years. He finally settled in Boise two decades ago. All that time, he never forgot the sauce nor lost touch with its inventor.
“Finally,” Linkowski says, “three years ago he offered to sell me the recipe for $50,000. And once I bought the recipe, that’s when I decided to come back into the restaurant business and open up the hot dog place.”
He opened Stan’s Char-Broiled Hot Dogs in Boise’s Vista Village Shopping Center in October 2007.
It should be made clear that Linkowski isn’t the type to start a business based on nothing more than condiment infatuation. Back in Buffalo, he saw the financial benefits of a superior dog sauce. The creator of that sauce, he says, could sell 5,000 hot dogs a day. Linkowski hoped to generate some of that enthusiasm in Boise. To start, he renamed the sauce Bronco sauce. To read the whole story, click here.
Boise Weekly: Best of Boise 2009
www.boiseweekly.comBest Place to Get Your Dog On
Stan's Char-Broiled Hot Dogs
Editors' Picks
Stan's know how fix up a foot-long. The Sahlen's Smokehouse hot dogs are imported from the East Coast weekly and a comfort-food meal can be topped off by a delicious dollop of frozen vanilla or chocolate custard. Stan's is one of those have-it-your-way kind of joints. Order your meat. Watch it cook. Choose your own adventure when it comes to toppings. Go traditional with onions, relish, mustard and ketchup or walk on the wild side with pickles, jalapenos and gooey cheese sauce. Owner Stan Linkowski also offers a secret Bronco sauce, which took years to perfect. But if the man is a dedicated-enough fan to name his concoction after the Broncos, we'd recommend leaving your Ducks hat at home if you want a squirt of Linkowski's special sauce.
"Stan's Lets the Dogs Out" by Jesse Nance
September 5, 2008 www.idahopress.comMeet the owner
Persistence paid off big for Stan Linkowski, owner of Stan's Char-broiled Hot Dogs in Boise. After he ate the best hot dog of his life in the 1960s in Buffalo, N.Y., it took him 40 years to convince a retired East Coast hot dog maker to sell him the recipe of his special sauce.
Linkowski re-dubbed the recipe "Bronco Sauce" and, one year after opening up shop on Vista Avenue in Boise, has built a loyal following of ballgame food enthusiasts.
"Once I tasted it, I knew then as a young kid that I wanted to get that sauce and open a place out here in the West because I knew it would be successful," Linkowski told PLAY.
He purchased the recipe, to which even his closest employees are not privy, for a whopping $50,000. But it was worth every penny to Linkowski, who was born in Buffalo and moved to Boise in 1957. To read the rest of this article, click here.
Boise Weekly: Best of Boise 2008
www.boiseweekly.comBest onion rings
Stan's Charbroiled Hot Dogs
Editors' Picks
Oh, they're good, the onion rings at Stan's Charbroiled Hot Dogs. They could be considered a meal, but go perfectly with charred meat. The secret might be the thick-cut onions dipped into a coveted deep-fry batter that is most likely crunchy even before it hits the oil. Once fried to a golden brown, the onion rings must be eaten right away. Dive in as you search for seating because the whole point is to get them in your belly while they're still hot.
Boise Weekly: "FOOD"---Stan's Char-Broiled Hot Dogs by Travis Estvold
July 16, 2008, www.boiseweekly.comI can recall with crisp detail the day I ate the best hot dog of my entire life: June 21, 2000. I was sitting way above first base in Boston's Fenway Park and my friend, whose birthday had prompted the trip to Beantown, introduced me to the world's greatest cased meat: the Fenway Frank. That day, I learned the importance of the word "wicked," rode my first T train and watched the Sox triumph over the Yanks, all memorable events on their own. But I will never forget that hot dog.
I'm not the world's foremost connoisseur, but I think I know a thing or two about hot dogs. Well, I thought I did until I met a mustachioed 71-year-old with white hair and more personality than a talk show host.
Stan Linkowski is the proprietor of Stan's Char-Broiled Hot Dogs, which opened in the Vista Village Shopping Center in October 2007. A restaurant management graduate of St. Bonaventure University in New York, Linkowski lusted after a Buffalo, N.Y., hot dog seller's recipe for Texas Red Hot Sauce for 40 years before the man finally caved. After shelling out $50,000—you read that right—and rechristening the accoutrement, Stan's "Bronco Sauce" was born. Linkowski will not, of course, reveal the recipe, but I'd describe it as the world's greatest lightly spiced, bean-free chili.
Hot dogs are available in nearly every grocery store in the nation, and Linkowski attributes his restaurant to a momentary lapse of sanity and a flare of ego that told him people would love his food. His Angus Burgers come from Burley, but every one of his dogs and sausages are flown in fresh weekly from Sahlen's, a 125-year-old premium meat producer in Buffalo—the city he attributes with having the best-tasting hot dogs in the country. Read on by clicking here.
818 South Vista Avenue
Boise, ID 83705
ph: 208-342-1199
stanshot
