Puka Dog, Poipu, Kaua’i

Puka Dog, Poipu, Kaua’i

The rods that toast the buns :: Puka Dog, Poipu, Kaua’i

John at Puka Dog, Poipu, Kaua’i

Puka Dog, Poipu, Kaua’i

They spelled it right! :: Puka Dog, Poipu, Kaua’i

Puka Dog, Poipu, Kaua’i

Puka Dog, Poipu, Kaua’i

John had seen this special on the Travel Channel about hotdogs and all the different types around the country from kosher dogs, to the Chicago dog, to LA, etc. and one of the show’s favorite dogs was a Hawaiian-style hotdog. We’d never had one before, any of us, so when we saw Puka Dog in the Poipu Shopping Village, John became obsessed!

Puka dog has these rods that they put an uncut bun on and it makes a hole and toasts the bun from the inside out. Then they slide the dog in along with your choice of condiments.. actualyl, here’s the proper way to order:

1. Choose your dog: Polish Sausage or Veggie Dog
2. Choose a secret garlic lemon sauce: Mild, Spicy, or Hot
3. Choose a tropical relish or traditional. Traditional is ketchup, mustard, guava sweet pickle relish. Tropical relishes are Kaua’i Special (mango relish), Pineapple Field (pineapple relish), Polihale Sunset (papaya relish), Coconut Beach (coconut relish), Waimea Canyon (banana relish), Na Pali Cruise (star fruit relish), and Poipu Beach (guava relish).

I got the Polish Sausage, Kaua’i Special with Mild Garlic Sauce and some lilikoi mustard. Here’s the thing, we all wanted to love this. The concept was brilliant! Sweet relishes with spicy sauce and a hotdog, all wrapped in a neat package. But they just didn’t pull it off right. Our complaints:

• The sausage was too small in comparison to the bun. Look how big the bun is! And there’s just a skinny little dog in there. At then end you’re basically just eating bun soaked with condiments.
• When you think relish you think chunks. Mango relish, coconut relish, pineapple relish.. they should all have chopped up fruits, like a pickle relish or salsa does, right? Except this relish was more like sauce. They just squeezed it into the hole with the hotdog. And it was wayyyy sweet and overpowering.
• Some of us thought that the garlic sauce was a fatty mess and that it was just fatty mayo with way too much garlic. Fatty mayo + fatty sausage = bad hot dog.

We talked about how much we loved the concept but not the execution so much that I think this will be our next business venture. I can’t disclose all the changes we talked about making or what we’d call our restaurant, because it’s confidential (wink, wink).

One plus for Puka Dog was that the fresh lemonade was the only drink you could order and it was awesome. Also awesome was the fact that they spelled my name right without me having to spell it out.

After the Puka Dog letdown we laid around by the pool to rest off our Puka overload… mostly a carb overload from that big bun and the Maui chips we had. Btw, “puka” means “hole” in Hawaiian. Even though we had some complaints about the place, it didn’t stop John from having a second dog, or buying a Puka Dog tshirt, or declaring that when he got a dog for a pet he was going to name it Puka and call it Puka Dog.

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