If you've ever topped a hot dog with ketchup in front of a group of Chicagoans, you've probably wanted to crawl in a hole after. Folks in the Windy City add mustard, relish, onions, and pickles to their dogs — not ketchup. The disgust is so real that a statement hating on the condiment just made it onto an Illinois Department of Transportation electronic traffic board.
“NO TEXTING. NO SPEEDING. NO KETCHUP,” reads a sign found on Interstate 90/94 in Chicago. Local Kevin Pang saw the electronic highway sign and snapped a photo from the passenger seat and took to Twitter to share it Saturday morning. "I swear to God this was not Photoshopped #chicago," Kevin captioned the shot, which since has received over a thousand likes and a hefty amount of replies like “Keep it off your hotdog or you will be deported from Chicago immediately.”
To be fair, ketchup does ruin the balance of all other toppings that are packed onto Chicago-style dogs: yellow mustard, sweet green pickle relish, onion, tomato wedges, pickle spear, sport peppers, and celery salt. Relish, for one, can often be sugary, so you don't need another sweet condiment, like ketchup. To those not from the Windy city this may all seem pretty absurd, but it falls on a similar line of debate as whether or not New Yorkers are to eat their one dollar slices folded in half or not folded. To each state their own, people.
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