Greensboro’s biggest loss wasn’t to Syracuse, it was an old hot dog joint

The real story in Greensboro on Wednesday night wasn’t an NIT game against Syracuse or whether Jim Boeheim would take another shot at the city. Instead, its denizens were in mourning, trying to cope with the loss of an old friend.

Yum Yum Better Ice Cream, a proud institution on UNCG’s campus, was destroyed earlier in the day when an SUV ran through the back wall of the building, forcing the city to condemn the restaurant.

Around since 1906, Yum Yum’s became trapped amid the rapid expansion of the campus around it, looking like the old man’s house in Up! before he tried to euthanize himself with all those balloons. (I think I need to see that movie again; this doesn’t sound right.)

The restaurant’s name was a misdirection. There are people who are stalwart in their belief that the ice cream was amazing, but I never really cared for it. Kind of like how Shake Shack has garbage milk shakes, and before you try to fight me on this point go to Cook Out then try to tread.

The real draw of Yum Yum was the hot dogs. Glorious, cheap, poor quality meat-missiles you would stuff in your face between classes while construction workers and octogenarians eating with their grandchildren would be scarfing down dogs alongside you.

The hot dogs themselves deserve no epic poems. They weren’t crafted by some artisanal sausage-maker using a recipe handed down through generations, and they definitely weren’t made of the finest ingredients. There were some pink-ass, grey-inside utilitarian protein pouches made of parts of the animal that deserve an “NSFW” tag if you saw them while the animal was alive. The meat wasn’t ground in such a way to preserve its integrity; it was likely blasted off the carcass with water jets before being forced through a sieve and willed to existence purely by humanity’s desire to prove it can control nature.

You’d always know Yum Yum rookies by how they’d order their dog. There was nothing functionally wrong with the cheese the store had to offer, but there was only one correct way to order: chili, slaw, onions, mustard.

It’s the North Carolina hot dog quartet. The chili was soupy and made of meat that was ironically less questionable than the hot dog it would be put on, the slaw had no memorable traits other than it being there, and the onions weren’t some caramelized Bobby Flay bullshit — they were plain white onions that felt specially selected to ensure the maximum amount of tears and sharpness possible. They were unnaturally horrible to taste on their own, but somehow worked on the hot dog.

When I went to UNCG, one of these dogs cost 99 cents. The prices were lower before I went to school and have risen since then. You can almost tell when a student attended the university based solely on the price of a Yum Yum’s dog when the student went there.

I know it’s weird to write lovingly about something that sounds so horrible on paper, but I just can’t convey how great a Yum Yum’s dog was. It was a hot meal when all you could afford was ramen, a sanctuary in the middle of campus where you could forget about the prose of your Chaucerian English class and destroy your body before running to Mythology.

I was eating a Yum Yum hot dog in between class when I was trying to muster the courage to ask my wife out for the first time, then again three years later when I was planning to propose. Now we’ve been married nine years and have a young daughter — we actually talked while she was pregnant about taking her to Yum Yum’s.

During my junior year, my eccentric friend Brian moved to Greensboro from Orlando because he felt like it, and he got a job at Yum Yum’s. It wasn’t so he could make a livable wage, because he’d only get a few hours a week. It was because he got free hot dogs. He ate 17 in a single sitting once.

On Wednesday night, the restaurant posted a hopeful message on Facebook claiming the place would eventually reopen. But many in Greensboro (myself included) are concerned this will never happen. The land the restaurant sits on has skyrocketed in value as the university has expanded, and logically it would make sense to shut the doors and sell it off. Every shuttered restaurant has said at one point or time that it would reopen, only to face the reality that closing makes more sense. Relocation is a possibility. The restaurant did move in 1973 to make way for the school’s new library, but a new home wouldn’t feel the same.

This story isn’t unique, not really. Every campus in America has its own Yum Yum’s — that place you unabashedly love not just because of what the food is, but what it represents and the memories you have there. I wish I could say I fondly remembered the last time I ate a hot dog at Yum Yum’s and that it marked another milestone in life, but in reality I don’t. It was probably hastily crammed in my face while running between errands.

In the end that feels appropriate.