Round Hot Dogs
This is SPAM! Rastelli's is SPAMming you! And they're calling it a Round Hot Dog to try to get you to fall for the trickery! I know because I had the same idea myself back in 2018. It all started in Germany, with a pub, a few steins of beer, and a delicious plate of food.
I happened to be in a part of Germany where English wasn't universally spoken, and being the dumb ugly American I am, I spoke no German beyond, "Muchas danke!" So I ended up ordering a lot of best guesses from restaurant menus. And my best guess at this particular pub not only tasted incredible, it gave me what I thought was an incredible idea. The dish was basically a hot dog, flattened and shaped into a round like a hamburger patty. An, ahem, Round Dog if you want to go with Rastelli's uninspired branding. As I ate it, I started thinking I should buy a food truck and sell these burger-shaped dogs, revolutionizing the iconic ballpark staple in much the same way the Ham Dogger did for dog-shaped burgers.
But what would I call it, this tubular hot dog condensed one way and expanded in another into a nice, manageable disc? ... ... A Flat Cat, that 's what! A brilliant product with a brilliant name, the likes of which had been heretofore unseen on the shores of America! I started mapping out my plan: acquire food truck; sell Flat CatsTM; get filthy, stinkin' rich! I'd go from truck to brick & mortar to nationwide franchises in the first year! Flat Cats were going to be the next - what's that? SPAM. Huh? SPAM. What you're eating, and what you're talking about, this "Flat Cat" gibberish, isn't it just SPAM?
That was my wife, She-Ra: Princess of Power. Sitting across from me, listening. Listening and being eternally rational. Eternally grounded. Eternally a buzzkill. Yeah, I guess Flat Cats would basically be sliced SPAM on a bun. My dreams were crushed.
And now I'm here to pay the dream-crushing forward to these Round Dogs, which I definitely do not recommend buying.
But if you do buy them, please let me know, because if I hear from a critical mass of dudes who are down to pay $18 for 8 Round Hot Dogs, surely it will mean I have a shot at turning Flat Cats into a billion-dollar enterprise after all.