PARIS

DESPITE having three Michelin stars at his restaurant in the Meurice hotel, Yannick Alléno considers himself a man of the people. His parents owned a modest bistro in a Paris suburb, where they served croque-monsieurs and sliced ham on buttered baguettes. “I was born behind the counter,” he said. He hates dishes that seem as if they came out of a chemistry class.

Whenever he goes to New York, he eats a hot dog from a street vendor. “I adore them,” he said. “Even with the bad water they sit in all day.”

It wasn’t much of a leap, then, for Mr. Alléno to create his own chien chaud.

Actually it is a veau chaud (pronounced voh show) — literally hot veal — a slender nine-inch sausage made from edible bits of a cooked calf head, or tête de veau. (The brains, eyes and fat are left out, and egg white and tiny threads of veal added to hold it together.)

The sausage is wrapped in a casing and boiled in a stock of carrots, leeks, onions and cloves. Then the casing is removed and the fragile sausage put in a crusty multigrain baguette.