Mike's Hot Dogs - 1135 Erie Boulevard, Schenectady, NY 12305
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Mike's is a restaurant we have been coming to for years. Twice a year Proctor's Theater in Schenectady holds a fantastic oldies concert with usually four or five fantastic acts. Before each concert, our friends and us come to Schenectady for dinner. It started out that we would eat at another local establishment, Morrette's, which also had some great desserts, but after a few bad dinner experiences at Morrette's we decided to go down the street to check out Mike's and see if they were better, and they were!
As for Morrette's, our last several times in there to try to get some hot fudge sundaes were met with "our ice cream machine is broken", and it turns out the service and quality at that restaurant had gone downhill since being taken over by a new owner recently, but we are happy to keep having our dinner at Mike's.
Now, Mike's is known as Mike's Hot Dogs, but we had never come here for those. When we would go to the Proctor's concerts, we would eat here because we had heard they had some of the best cheesesteaks outside of Philadelphia, The first time I ate here, I was craving a good cheesesteak and I was hoping it would be better than what I'd had at Morrette's. It was much better. The steak was sliced thin, piled high, and melted in my mouth like butter.
Now, they only call them Steak Sandwiches. The cheese costs extra but it's well worth it. The peppers also cost extra, however you can get the sandwich with onions and sauce at no extra charge. I prefer to get mine with just cheese on it and I like to add ketchup to it (as you can see above, for our recent visit, I kind of jumped the gun a bit and put my ketchup on before I took the picture of the sandwich, as I was so excited to be getting one of these sandwiches again).
The sandwich tasted just as good as it always did. If I had one complaint, it would be that they cooked the sandwich on the same grill as they had previously cooked a fish fry without cleaning it afterwards, so part of the sandwich did end up tasting like fish. I didn't mind, though, as I love the sandwich anyway, but if anyone from the restaurant reads this, please learn to cook your foods in different locations specifically for those foods.
Anyway, since we weren't here for a concert on our most recent visit (as it was just Crissy and myself), we were able to take our time here and not feel rushed to get over to the theater. I decided, what the heck, I would try some new foods here that I hadn't yet tried. Mike's is known for their hot dogs so I had to see what was so special about them:
I was asked if I wanted it with the works (which was sauce, onions and mustard), and I was originally thinking of just ordering a plain hot dog, but I decided to get it with the sauce. It's not quite a chilli sauce, this seems to be a bit like the Greek Sauce we can find around Erie. The sauce had a great flavor to it and really added to the hot dogs. I don't know of onions or mustard are even necessary with the dog but most people seem to prefer them that way. As much as I love the steak sandwiches here, I will be coming back more often for the hot dogs, which are my new favorite item here.
My friends and I would often get the french fries while we were coming here before a concert, but this time around we decided to try the curly fries here, which we had never had before:
Amazing to think of what we had been missing by getting the regular fries instead of these. I think these would go good with some kind of seasoning on them, but they were wonderful as-is, too.
By this time, we had been completely stuffed and did not have any room for desserts, though they looked very good. I think next time we will have to try one of them. We are also hoping to make it back sometime for breakfast, as they have a large breakfast menu available until 11 A.M. which people seem to enjoy.
The prices here are for the most part reasonable, especially when it comes to the hot dogs and the breakfast foods. I suspect if they lowered the prices of their steak sandwiches, they would sell a whole lot more of those. I am already looking forward to my next visit in town (which will likely be before the next oldies concert at Proctor's) to make another trip to Mike's.
It's time for us to be hitting the road again. We'll check in again next week with our next review. If you have comments about this restaurant, please let us know your thoughts by leaving a comment on this post. If there's a restaurant in your local area (whether or not it is local to us) that you'd like us to check out for a possible review on our blog, let us know by messaging us on our Facebook Page. If you have your own pictures or reviews to add to our blog, drop us a line because we would love to add further reviews for these and other restaurants to our site.
Until the next time, we'll catch you on the flip side.
For Diehls On The Road, this is Tom Diehl, signing off....
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