Crestline restaurant to be featured on 'Southern and Hungry'

On the evening of Sept. 10, Cooking Channel viewers in Mountain Brook will see a familiar name grace the T.V. as Gus’s Hotdogs will be featured on the show “Southern and Hungry.”

Gus’s has been in Crestline for about 50 years, said owner Traci DeShazo, who purchased the business in 1990.

“It’s been a long time,” she said. “It’s kind of a staple, you know?”

The restaurant, while named for hotdogs, features a varied menu of “anything from hotdogs to chicken Greek salads,” DeShazo said. Everything, except for the hotdogs, is made in-house, and patrons frequently order hotdogs and hamburgers.

DeShazo said the T.V. crew found their way to Mountain Brook after the co-host and former Crestline resident, Rutledge Wood, wanted to film in Birmingham and include his “favorite childhood memory of eating Gus’s Hotdogs,” said local resident Fred Owen.

Owen, a longtime customer who lives on Euclid Avenue, was chosen to be the spokesman for Gus’s on the T.V. show. Owen has been eating at Gus’s since he was a teen when it first opened. When he was younger, he and his friends would go to Gus’s after football practice, eat a dollars-worth of hotdogs, and then return home to eat dinner. He’s been a proponent of the restaurant since its early years.

“I was born and raised in Birmingham, and I like to be an ambassador if I can,” Owen said.

He still eats at Gus’s regularly, including for breakfast.

“Nobody eats breakfast there, and they should, because its good and their biscuits are as good as anywhere,” Owen said.

The production crew filmed at Gus’s about a month and a half ago, DeShazo said, and Owen said they fit cameras, lights, booms and about 15 people into the restaurant on Church Street. The film crew put together different shots of the food — DeShazo said they included the “basic” menu, such as hotdogs, chili, hot beef, sauce and coleslaw — and restaurant before interviewing Owen by the front window about the food and Gus’s toward the end of the day.

Owen said the front window was perfect because it’s “where I always sit anyway,” and the director gave him prompts to help him talk about his history of coming to Gus’s and the different food he has eaten there. He was nervous to be interviewed, but called the entire production “extremely interesting.”

DeShazo said she too was nervous about doing the program at first, but “it ended up being really fun.”

“It was a good experience, and everyone was nice,” she said. 

Gus’s Hotdogs will be featured for about seven minutes, she said, alongside Ovenbird on Third Avenue South and Johnny’s Restaurant on 18th Street South in Homewood.

“I was honored that they [the Cooking Channel] even wanted to do it,” DeShazo said. “Sometimes, there’s nothing better than just a simple hotdog.”

Gus’s Hotdogs will be on “Southern and Hungry” on the Cooking Channel on Sept. 10 at 8 p.m. CST.

Editor's note: This article was updated at 8:32 a.m. on Sept. 10 to correct the start time of the television episode.