City eatery’s visitors can’t get enough of doughboys

The doughboy, a chicken, spice and cream cheese baked concoction sold at Esperanto restaurant, has become a late-night legend on Caroline Street.

The ingredients are baked inside pizza dough until the outside is golden brown.

They sell like hotcakes.

On a busy summer night in Saratoga Springs, between 800 and 1,000 doughboys will be sold at $3.50 each.

“It’s our best seller by far,” said Will Pouch, an owner of Esperanto, at 6 1⁄2 Caroline St.

A doughboy fan club has even emerged on Facebook, with 736 members who discuss and long for the baked treat, especially people no longer living in Saratoga Springs.

The doughboy and some other Esperanto favorites are also sold during concerts at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center.

“It was kind of a culinary accident of sorts,” said Sheldon Solomon, the Skidmore College psychology professor who invented the doughboy years ago when he was in college in Pennsylvania.

“I’m hard pressed to understand why people like them,” Solomon said. But he said it pleases him greatly that the doughboy is so popular.

“It’s just an unexpected combination of foods that normally aren’t prepared together,” Solomon said.

He and his former Skidmore student, Will Pouch, and their wives opened Esperanto 16 years ago. They started selling the doughboy after testing them on customers at a nearby bar. Everybody seemed to like them.

“It’s a unique thing, kind of different,” Pouch said.

They took Solomon’s secret mix of sauteed chicken breast, cream cheese, spices, cheddar and scallions and tried wrapping it in pizza dough and baking the whole thing.

“It looked good and tasted good,” Pouch said.

Solomon, who is still a part owner of Esperanto, said he was introduced prior to giving a lecture at Harvard University several years ago as “the guy from Skidmore who invented the doughboy.”

“What makes them good is that they are made fresh,” Solomon said.

Chris Biddle, a manager at Esperanto, said people usually order two doughboys. Many customers like to add hot sauce to them.

“Those two together [doughboy and hot sauce] is a match made in heaven,” Biddle said.

The doughboy has become a mainstay of Saratoga Springs, like going to Saratoga Race Course or visiting the Museum of Dance, Biddle said.

“But don’t forget to get a doughboy,” he said. “It has definitely become a tradition.”

Skidmore College students are great doughboy fans, he said.

Esperanto opens at 11 a.m. for lunch but usually stays open until 4 a.m. most weekend nights and until 2 a.m. weekday nights to serve the late-night crowd.

“It gets pretty darn busy down here,” Biddle said about the late-night and early-morning crowd craving doughboys.

The eatery also serves a variety of international foods with roots in Mexico, Greece, Thailand and the Middle East.

Pouch said that in the restaurant’s earlier days, when their ovens were smaller, they would sometimes start running out of doughboys late at night. He said this upset the people lined up to buy them, and on occasion, fistfights erupted when someone tried to cut in line to get one of the last ones available.

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