Variety gives these dogs some real bite.

Byline: The Register-Guard

BEST HOT DOG The Dog House Where: 195 E. 17th Ave. Hours: 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Friday, noon to 9 p.m. Saturday, noon to 7 p.m. Sunday Phone: [phone]

For some, Memorial Day means it's time to start wearing white shoes again.

For us, it's the start of hot dog season. Time to cram your face with some bad-for-you goodness and chase it down with a Coke. You don't even need a plate. It's the cheapest, quickest, most satisfying summer meal you'll ever eat, period.

Mustard? Relish? It really doesn't really matter. There is no bad hot dog - except maybe a veggie dog. Sorry, Smart Dog! crusaders; ground up Identity Preserved soybeans are no match for mechanically separated meat. Don't even try to scare us with your hot dog horror stories. We know what's in there and we'll take two.

Finding a good frank is easy. Finding the best takes some doing.

If we had taken on this challenge a year ago, we might have cited Costco or Jerry's or Home Depot or Brundoggie's hot dog cart. The Eugene Emeralds have good dogs, and you can't beat the dog-eating ambience, but we recommend the snack shack over the bleacher salesman. The Ems' dogs don't travel well.

Even with all these different tube steaks in town, the hot dog experts kept telling us no one can touch The Dog House on 17th Avenue. This Portland chain, our pudgy friends promised us, offers a hot dog experience that will satisfy even the pickiest Chicagoan on a sausage bender.

The Dog House offers at least 14 different sausages, including the signature Giant German Beer Sausage, a Portland-made Long Weiner Dog and a classic Big All-Beef Kosher Frank. We ordered the daily special, a cheddar dog, and added a frankfurter on the side to see what this place was truly made of.

The Dog House did not disappoint. The frank was plump and tasty and passed the mustard-only test with flying colors. The cheddar dog, while tricky to eat with its natural casing, was sinfully delicious. We tackled that one with mustard, relish and chopped onions.

For those who like their dogs drowning in condiments (`dragged through the garden" as they say in Chicago), The Dog House offers two kinds of mustards, two relishes, onions, peppers, sauerkraut and, for the sacrilegious, ketchup.

One woman who walked into the bright-yellow-and-red interior of the Dog House while we were there seemed grateful to have finally discovered a place that did dogs like they deserved to be done. A young couple ordered a pair of cheddar franks to eat on the back porch, and we sat next to a Dog House regular who broke the menu down into "hard dogs" such as the Smokey Joe and "soft dogs" like the classic frank. He recommended a bottled root beer on the side and lots of hot peppers to add some antioxidants to your diet.

"You can't get this stuff at 7-Eleven,' he pointed out.

Best of ... freshens breath instantly. To read the Best of ... archive, go to www.registerguard .com/bestof.