Hot Doug’s owner/operator Doug Sohn endured two years without being allowed to add foie gras to the restaurant's gourmet dogs due to the city’s ban. He plans to add it back to the menu now that it has been repealed.

He doesn’t run a French bistro or a trendy fusion restaurant, but Doug Sohn, the owner/operator of Chicago’s Hot Doug’s, believes the foie gras ban slapped on the city in April 2006 – which was just reversed this May – seemed ridiculous. He hopes the city’s “done with this nonsense."

Before the ban, Sohn, a foie gras aficionado, often infused his gourmet sausages with the fatty duck liver, sometimes topped his dogs with pieces of the French delicacy and incorporated it into sauces. When the news came of the ban, he and his patrons were miffed and felt the energy was misplaced. “It struck me that here are people with too much time on their hands,” he says, a sentiment that Mayor Richard M. Daley echoed. “We have finite time and energy and resources available. There are genuine problems in the world. Why waste it on this? It was absurd.”

Not to mention, Sohn found it bizarre that people were frantic over foie gras when he serves a number of exotic game, too, from kangaroo to antelope. “It’s just a duck,” he says, adding that it was an easy target. 

He also found the moral foundation on which protesters build their grievances a little shaky. “We all have moral standards,” he adds. “If you wear leather, eat burgers [or] use animal products, what’s the difference [between that and foie gras]? We raise animals to eat them. It’s not a pretty process. As carnivores, it’s what we do.”

His fierce opposition to the ban and refusal to take foie gras off the menu “purely to be a smart ass” got the hot dog purveyor fined, and he was the subject of many headlines. “[I wasn’t] making political statement,” he asserts. “I did not anticipate the publicity that would result from it. [I did it] just to be a contrarian and to see what would happen.”

What happened was the health department fined him “pretty quickly” after two warnings. “[The department officials] certainly were not shy in letting us know they didn’t find it amusing,” he recalls.

With the repeal of the ban, Sohn says he plans to return foie gras specials to the menu by mid-June, when it can again be served legally.