Durham Bulls Concessions, Ranked: A Hot Dog Monogamist Plays the Field

One inning in, the Bulls are down a pair and the first wedding is underway. The officiant leans into his mic. 

“A marriage is a lot like a night out with White Claws,” he begins, and I promptly tune out, turning my attention instead to a bag of glazed pecans I bought from a local vendor called dinkers®.

The nuts are still toasty from the hotel pan they were lounging in back at the dinkers® kiosk. Between that and their flavors—Canadian whiskey, cinnamon, and sugar cooked to the moment before it started to smoke—they confer a rich amber warmth that feels out of place on a summer night.

What the nuts lack in ballparkliness, though, they make up for in a sticky nostalgic quality I’ll term “crackerjackitude.” I inhale them until my molars are completely packed with caramel, then zone back into the ceremony.

“By the power vested in me by Mix 101.5,” the officiant is saying, “kiss your girl!” 

He asks everyone to raise a drink. I hold up a nut.

I’m forever on the verge of getting a soft pretzel only to talk myself out of it. Tonight, I have a real excuse to follow through.

My enthusiasm dims the moment it’s passed over the counter. The pretzel has a stiff, inedible sheen, like someone dipped it in bat lacquer.

One bite wicks the moisture from my mouth; it’s crusted in rock salt and stale to the core.

I hand it off to Matt, typing “sand from the shore of the Dead Sea” into my Notes app.

“This tastes like sand,” Matt says, looking up from his own bite.

In better news, the Bulls just tied up the game.

A number of local vendors have outposts throughout the concourse—Pie Pushers, Two Roosters, Mezcalito—but homegrown food is also tucked into one of the more generic, Bulls-operated stands, Home Plate BBQ, which sources pulled pork from a wholesaler out of Greensboro.

The platter I get at Home Plate BBQ—pork, mac and cheese, coleslaw, and cornbread—delivers. The coleslaw, a soupy mound, forgoes crunch, but it’s wonderfully seasoned, and all the liquid ends up going to use—it soaks right into the cornbread, which is otherwise a touch dry. The pork is tangy-sharp on my palate but soft on my tongue, downy like cake crumbs.

A few days before this outing, my pescatarian coworker told me that every time she eats a veggie dog at a Bulls game, she worries that they accidentally gave her a real one—as in, they’re just that on point.

It must have been a long time since sweet Chloe ate a real hot dog. Or maybe I’m catching the Home Plate Hot Dog stand, which also sold me the sand pretzel, on a bad night. Each bite tastes like a mouthful of bread wrapped around tacky, slightly denser bread.

Ever since the Durham restaurant Mezcalito opened a satellite at the Bulls stadium a few years ago, I’ve been telling myself that their nachos must be overpriced—a weird crotchetiness that likely stems from the fact that these nachos skyrocketed to popularity soon after debuting several years ago, a rookie everyone instantly became obsessed with.

My assignment tonight finally compels me to order some. The experience is humbling. The nachos aren’t cheap—$15.99 for the veggie version—but I get a mountain of food for the money, and each element dazzles me. Toppings that usually come skimped, like guac and chipotle mayo, are laid on thick. Queso graces every chip. I figured “veggie” would just mean no meat, but the chips come strewn with roasted zucchini, bell pepper, mushroom, and onion.

Compared to the dank fluorescence of other booths, the Mezcalito stand is also an oasis—open air, draped in hanging plants. I feel like I’ve gone to hang out with the it-girl at school to find that she lives in a mansion and is also really nice.

As I’m feeling preemptively guilty about maybe shifting my default order away from the hot dog in the future, I hear a husband being shaded during a vow renewal. He “normally doesn’t do big romantic gestures,” says an officiant, reading a script that sounds like it was written by the guy’s wife. But, the officiant continues, the husband has finally found it in himself to pull a gesture together—re-upping his marriage at a Wednesday night Bulls game. 

I get it. Sometimes it takes a gimmick to break out of a rut.

It’s the bottom of the eighth inning and the score has somehow swelled to 10-2 without me noticing. The Bulls are fried. I’ve got one more food to try.

Matt joins me for the walk to the funnel cake kiosk, immediately falling into banter with the crew behind the counter. It’s the end of the night, so they end up giving us a second cake for free. 

After a few pulls of dough, I decide this is the platonic ideal of a funnel cake: lace edges, squishy middle, buttery base note, beaucoup powdered sugar (one of the guys at the kiosk kept cranking until we told him “when”).

With nothing left to taste, Matt, Sarah, and I lay the detritus of our meal on the ground to take a photo, explaining to the intrigued row of college students behind us that we’re professional journalists. A minute later, one of them pipes up: She’s a rising junior in journalism school, she says, and she’s curious if print newspapers are doing OK. We laugh uneasily, and I point to the caloric remnants below us, spread out like roadkill.

“What does it look like?” I quip.

We end up giving the students our extra funnel cake, a consolation for the younger generation. A few minutes later I turn around and ask them how it is. Mouths too full to answer, they give me big thumbs-ups and nod, faces dusted white with powdered sugar.