Brat Summer Is Over. It's Time for Wurst Winter, with a New Sausage Stop in Chicago

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Chicago is a sausage town. Just think about how much we tout and argue over our hot dogs, not to mention the Maxwell Street Polish sausage, the hot links served at Chicago-style barbecue joints, and the various old-school delis still standing that grind meat into tubes to cater to immigrant populations from Central and Eastern Europe.

But few restaurants in Chicago have spotlighted encased meats since the closure of Hot Doug’s a decade ago. Now there’s a new sausage house and beer garden on the scene that has a real banger of a name: Wurst Behavior, which opens this week in Irving Park at 4009 N. Elston Avenue. It features six sausages made in-house daily, from bratwursts with various heaped toppings to a Nashville hot chicken-inspired dog to Italian and Andouille. Yes, there’s a Chicago dog too, with an all-beef hot dog made in-house – and smoked. (Gasp!)

“It’s smoked over pecan wood, so maybe that’s a little bit different [from] how Vienna does it,” says Art Wnorowski, the chef and owner of Wurst Behavior along with his wife Gosia Pieniazek.

Smoking meat is as natural to Wnorowski as the snappy natural casings on his sausages. He and Pieniazek also own the restaurants Ella’s BBQ in Lincoln Park and Earl’s BBQ in Jefferson Park, and pulled pork and smoked wings both appear on the menu at Wurst Behavior. But it’s their third restaurant, Wicker Park's popular Pierogi Kitchen, that led them to convert their Mas Tacos concept into Wurst Behavior.

“We noticed that people have been coming in and enjoying the sausage as well, so I started developing more recipes based on the Polish kielbasa we make over there,” Wnorowski explains. The smoked kielbasa is made from his grandfather’s recipe. “I grew up in Poland visiting my grandparents’ farm quite often, and I witnessed them making sausages from scratch, from slaughtering to smoking, the whole process.”

The beers served at Wurst Behavior also largely hearken back to the old country, with a focus on locally made pilsners and lagers – the kinds of light beers preferred in Central and Eastern Europe. They can be enjoyed as they are in Europe, in a beer garden on the back patio of Wurst Behavior, alongside cocktails with housemade ingredients. Many of the condiments, such as a hazy IPA mustard and pickles, will also be made in-house.

Wurst Behavior is not the first instance of Wnorowski and Pieniazek following customer demand and reinventing a restaurant. “I’m constantly challenging myself, and this gives me a drive to do new things,” Wnorowski says. “I like being creative.”

Pierogi Kitchen also grew out of demand for a product: it opened last year as another barbecue joint, but the smoked brisket pierogi served at brunch was such a hit that Wnorowski and Pieniazek decided to rebrand early this year and focus on pierogi and other Polish food.

“We never thought about doing Polish food,” when they first started opening restaurants, Wnorowski says. “For whatever reason, we were kind of intimidated by calling it Polish.”

Now they’re not only serving the accessible and well-known pierogi, the potato and cheese version of which will also be available at Wurst Behavior, including on top of a hot dog. They also offer less familiar Polish dishes at Pierogi Kitchen such as the “hunter’s stew” bigos, dill pickle soup, pickled herring, and stuffed cabbage – which is on the menu at Wurst Behavior, too, in modified form.

“We didn’t have a culture of dining out [in Poland], so every house was like its own restaurant,” Wnorowski says, which means there are innumerable versions of dishes with slight differences – and everyone thinks their own is the best. “Sausages are also regional. We have our way of making it, and I’m not saying this is the best or the only way of making it, but we love it,” Wnorowski says. “We’re excited to share it with everybody.”