The Mean Wiener

Go there Wednesdays $ 1.50 tacos ! Tried their mean wiener and it was pretty good. Asked for extra peppers & extra crispy hand cut fries! Came out fast ! Fries are pretty good here!

If you want fish tacos you want Mean Weiner. Inexpensive and delicious. Be sure to get Guac and chips too! A lot of food for the money. The service is great too. Everyone is always hardworking !! Can’t beat it. Always tip your hardworking server !!!

Great prices and great food! Not only do they make a mean wiener but they have great tacos too! I don’t think I’ve ever had a better taco! It’s quick and easy. Service is good– not outstanding, but fast. That’s the only reason I didn’t give 5 stars :) :) :) :)

TACOS! This is a typical lunch spot for me, 2 – 3 times per week. Can’t get enough of their steak tacos. The menu is so large I keep going back to try new things. Haven’t found something on the menu I don’t care for. Hot dogs are great, goes great with one of their chocolate shakes… but the tacos are brilliant! You’ve got to get yourself some Mean Wieners and Angry Tacos!

I love this place, it is the very best fast food spot on the Northshore! I know, because after 25 years of working in this area, I know them all. Best Taco’s, Best Hotdogs, Best Beef Sandwiches.

First time here wife and I tried the Coney dog and an order of tacos. The hot dog was good with some snap and nice toppings, would change the bun though. It was a lot of bread, even with the over-​sided novelty link. Tacos were good, especially the al pastor. Salsa had nice flavor to it.
Have to come back on a Wednesday for discount taco night.

Great place for a quick fix of dogs or Italian beef or great tacos. It’s all there reasonable and good. And lightning fast.

Mean tacos are the best. Good food overall, the jumbo hotdogs are great on the regular menu. But steak tacos are great

This place was mediocre at best.
The hot dogs were not anything special,
I’ve had better dogs at Home Depot of Gurnee.
The hamburger apparently was cooked on the same grill as the tacos! Mexican flavor hamburger? Awful.
Not gonna do this place again.

My husband and I went here on a Sunday afternoon after spending the morning at Prairie Wolf Dog Park with our Weimaraner. We sat out front with our dog and enjoyed delicious hot dogs and French fries that hit the spot! Will definitely be back on other visits to the dog park!

How can you not like this place with a name like that?!
I had a chicken taco. Not the best I’ve ever had and not worst. It was very large for a street taco.
I also ordered the Mexican corn. It was a bit spicy, but delicious!
For dessert I ordered the funnel cake. So good, reminded me of summer at the fair. It had perfectly crispy edges and soft doughiness in he middle.
They had some pretty good weekly specials on the wall I noticed when I ordered. This is a good place to being eating out on a budget.

Mean wiener/​Mean Taco catered a casual family gathering for us and the food was fresh, hot and really delicious! All my guests were happy and went back for seconds of enchiladas, beans, rice, guacamole, chips and all the fixings. Everyone wanted to know where I got the food so they could visit there too!

The best hot dogs in the Chicagoland area. They also have very good tacos. The fish and shrimp are the best. Two people can eat a great meal for under $ 15. Awesome

Food was good. We had 2 tacos (barbacoa beef and barbacoa chicken), a mean wiener and fries. Tacos could be more flavorful. Overall good food. Large menu to choose from. I recommend you check it out.

Ordered ground beef taco, it came with shredded so it’s more like a BBQ taco. I dislike it so much that I’m not even getting a to-​go box but the staff is nice. My fave is Isaac & Moishe’s deli but they were closed.

Love the name and that’s what got us in, but the food was just okay. Had a polish and some fries and a taco meal. Probably wouldn’t go back, no stand outs

Dinner for $ 3? Count me in! I’m hooked on taco Wednesday, and now my family is too.
Every Wednesday Mean Tacos are $ 1.50 each, and that probably explains why the line is out the door, depending on when you stop in. We’ve now made Wednesday’s a priority here. We each get two tacos, and if we’re extra hungry we share a basket of fries. I’ve tried the chorizo, pork, and chicken.
The tacos are authentic and loaded with your choice of ingredients. The chorizo is a bit spicy and greasy in a good way. The chicken is fresh but a little bland for me, and the pork is rich and melts in your mouth. I typically like to shake things up between the pork and chicken, because they balance each other out nicely.
The fries are still crispy delicious. No matter how full I am, I always have room for one more fry.

Checked this place out recently after a recommendation. After trying their food, I thought it was just okay tasting food. I had food from the Mean Tacos part of their menu. Had a regular Al Pastor taco and a Chicken Al Pastor. They tasted average and nothing special. They were slightly on the bland side. The meat portion in the tortilla seemed less. I have had better tasting tacos elsewhere. I liked the name of the restaurant, the menu set-​up (American and Mexican fast food) and relatively reasonable prices for the place it is. Next time, I’ll try their Mean Weiner side of the menu.

Honestly, I’m not all that sure why the weiner is so mean; in fact I’ve never eaten a hot dog that’s insulted me… despite this, The Mean Weiner’s hot dogs as delicious as they are apparently mean. Having been in the Northshore area for several years, I’ve been meaning to try this local phenomenon, but I’d never actually made the couple mile trek to this hotspot. For years its relatively low cost and delicious-​tasting weiners has attracted high-​schoolers and college students as well as many of the locals to this joint. It is obviously best known for the $ 3.95 weiner and fries combo which, if you are going for the first time, you should definitely order. OR — if you’re especially hungry get the jumbo or super jumbo version of this hot dog. Do not, I repeat do not, let anyone persuade you into ordering anything but a hot dog on your first visit. After your first visit feel free to try anything else.
I went on a Friday night with a friend and on the entire drive to The Mean Weiner I was soooooo excited to try their hot dog and compare it to both Superdawg and Portillo’s…but then I got to the restaurant and saw that they had Italian beef sandwiches which was my downfall. I’d just been introduced to Italian beefs by my fiancé a couple weeks prior so my curiosity went into over-​drive and I decided that I should tap into my adventurous side and compare the beef sandwiches. So, yes, I neglected my intense craving for a mean weiner and ordered the beef sandwich which was actually quite more expensive, granted it didn’t wipe out my wallet. Long story, short I was a little bit disappointed with having ordered an Italian beef because of its lack in flavor as well as the fatty beef pieces tucked into the sandwich. I understand that by ordering an Italian beef sandwich you are committing to the ingesting of several hundred unhealthy calories, but c’mon now — I don’t want to be eating grimy fat.
Now, being disappointed with my first visit there I took my fiancé there a couple of days later so that we could both try the mean weiner, as was the plan all along. I was not going to be swayed that time! We ordered the jumbo mean weiner which was only about $ 4.95 — not a bad deal, considering that that you also got a large portion of fries along with the hot dog. Let me just say that I was much more impressed with the hot dog than the Italian beef sandwich. Me and my fiancé were trying to rank the quality of this hot dog compared to those at Superdawg and Portillo’s and this is what we came up with:
1. The Mean Weiner
1 or 2. Superdawg
2 or 3. Portillo’s
Now — the reasoning for this ranking is that The Mean Weiner has one advantage over the others… the baguette. The hot dog is in the softest baguette and it simply makes the weiner wonderful. The downside of the hot dog here (which is why Superdawg is of almost equal rank) is that the hot dog is not a classic Chicago style dog.
Besides the food here, they have some beer for you if that’s what you want, but I do recommend that you get the Horchata. Yes, I know, Horchata is typically preserved for Mexican food, but it is delicious and worth the hundreds of sugary calories. It is actually very thick and creamy — easy to slurp down. I’m not quite sure if you’re «technically» allowed to get refills of it, but I definitely got refills!
The couple of things that I wasn’t too entirely fond of, besides the fatty Italian beef sandwiches, was that the menu seemed a little odd — I’ve never particularly seen a place that offered both hot dogs and Mexican food in one spot. Who knows — it could be good, but since the emphasis is on the hot dogs I find it hard to believe that the other food would be great. Also, there always seems to be screaming kids at the restaurant. Of course this is situational and doesn’t necessarily reflect the quality of the restaurant, but it makes an experience less desirable.
Moral of the story — go for the hot dogs! They are worth it!

I’ve been to the Mean Wiener a number of times but can only review one menu item because it is so good that I can’t move on from it. What is this enchanting food mesmerizer you ask. It’s their Philly Cheese steak! OMG it’s so good. Packed full of meat smothered with cheese, green peppers and grilled onions it is perfection! The sandwich is quite large and comes with a heaping helping of perfectly crisped and seasoned fries, for only $ 7.95. Easily can be two meals.
Place is set up nicely as a kitchy hot dog joint. Nicely decorated it’s fun to dine in. We did try to call ahead to order and dine in but they won’t do that. If you call ahead it has to be an order to go.