Reindeer Sausage Sandwich

The link is what the sandwich is about, and it is not pure reindeer. Caribou and reindeer are the same species, and the meat is dark and lean, too lean to hold together as a sausage by itself, so the cart links are cut with pork and beef and smoked into a firm, faintly gamey, slightly sweet sausage that grills well. Picked up cold it looks like an ordinary smoked link; the difference is in the cure and the flavor, a low, earthy note under the smoke that the pork and beef round out rather than bury.

It is built on a flat-top, not boiled or steamed. The link goes onto the griddle and stays there until the casing tightens and snaps and the outside takes some color, which gives it a firmer chew than a plump water-cooked hot dog. Alongside it, a heap of sliced onions cooks down slow on the same steel, and the local move is to glaze them as they go: many carts pour a little cola or other soda over the onions so they caramelize sweet and sticky and pick up a dark sheen.

The assembly is a hot dog's, with the proportions of a hot dog and the latitude of one too. The seared link drops into a split bun, the cola onions go over the top in a soft tangle, and from there the build is wide open. A vendor's table is a field of squeeze bottles: yellow mustard as the baseline, then whatever a given cart is known for, from a pink salsa rosada to pineapple sauce to a house "boss sauce." Some out-of-state carts even finish it Seattle-style with a layer of cream cheese piped from a caulking gun, though that is the road version more than the Anchorage one.

The flavor reads as a smarter hot dog rather than something exotic. The sausage carries more depth and a faintly wild edge against a regular frank, the sweet sticky onions push against the smoke, and the mustard's sharpness keeps the whole sweet-savory pile from going flat. It is rich and a little messy and built to be eaten standing up, the bun darkening with juice from the onions before you are halfway down it.

Where you eat one is half the experience. This is sidewalk food, a warm-weather fixture of downtown Anchorage where the carts cluster along Fourth Avenue through the long daylight of the Alaskan summer, working the lunch crowd from the office towers and the tourists off the buses. Locals make up much of the line and tend to coach first-timers through it, and the carts have personality to spare, run by named owners with their own sauces, their own hours, and their own reputations.

A Summer Cart Staple

There is no single inventor on record and no founding date for the reindeer dog, which is fair for a street food that grew out of a regional protein and the hot-dog template rather than from one kitchen. Reindeer and caribou have been eaten in Alaska for a very long time; turning the meat into a smoked link and selling it from a downtown cart is a more recent, and undated, convergence. What the record supports is the shape of the thing: by the 2010s the reindeer dog had been a summertime street-cart specialty in Anchorage for well over two decades, which places its rise as a cart staple no later than the early 1990s.

Its public face has been the carts themselves and the people who run them. M.A.'s Gourmet Dogs, operated by Mike Anderson, became the best-known of them, famous as much for the owner's blunt personality and his grilling as for the sausage, a downtown Fourth Avenue fixture that drew tens of thousands of customers a season. The reindeer dog's reputation in Anchorage is inseparable from a handful of such named vendors rather than from any brand or chain.

The carts have seen turnover, including the death of one of Anchorage's most prominent reindeer-dog vendors in 2016, but the dog itself has outlasted any single stall and even left the state. Versions now turn up on carts as far afield as Denver and Portland, carried out by the Alaska diaspora, which is an unusual trajectory for so regional a food: a lean northern game meat, stretched with pork and beef and dressed in cola onions, that became portable enough to travel the Lower 48.