With the likes of J Dawgs, Kranky Franks and Hot Dog King already catering to local diners, it’s no small undertaking to go after a piece of the hot dog action in Utah Valley. It’s no Coney Island out there, but still. How many top-quality tube steaks can one rural county consume?

Dawgs & More, the newest combatant in the Utah County hot dog wars, has a prominent ground zero on Center Street in Orem, in the colorful premises formerly occupied by Jamaican eatery The Jerk Shack. For the hundreds of drivers who zoom past every day, it’s hard (if not impossible) to miss seeing that somebody is once again cooking up something tasty in that highly visible location.

As patrons of The Jerk Shack probably recall, the building is tiny. Not sno-cone vendor tiny, but also not much larger than the amount of space strictly required to store and prepare the food. You can drive up or walk up, but you can’t go inside and sit down. There is no inside, but there’s lots of sit down, so if you want a dine-in experience, wait for a sunny afternoon, throw a blanket in the trunk of your car and picnic on the wide green lawn immediately east of the walk-up window.

The best way to stand out from the hot dog horde is probably in what goes into your buns along with the fairly standard 100 percent all-beef franks. And in that regard, Dawgs & More has an impressive array of secret weapons, including macaroni and cheese, avocados, mango salsa, peanut mustard, cole slaw and more.

There are lots of dogs to try, and Dawgs & More has a couple of solid options for indecisive eaters. You can order a half-and-half jumbo dawg, which lets you try two varieties of toppings, or get one of the combo offerings on sliders, half-length dogs in smaller buns. There are breakfast burritos for the morning commuter, hearty nachos for a lazy afternoon, and I think I even spotted a salad option on the menu.

Mixing three classic comfort foods in one tantalizing package, the chili mac-and-cheese dawg is a great way to indulge your taste buds and probably wreck your diet. I consoled my waistline by only having a chili mac-and-cheese slider, but I probably wouldn’t have had any trouble polishing off the jumbo version. (You can also get a mac-and-cheese dawg or a chili dawg, if you were the kind of childhood eater who didn’t like your foods to touch.)

I also enjoyed the nutty bacon dawg, which has nicely crispy bacon and peanut mustard. And while I like bacon, I reserve for avocados — which you can also put in almost everything — the rabid affinity that the rest of the world seems to have developed for, you know, fried strips of pig meat. So my eyes popped at the sight of the avocado bacon cheese dawg and the avocado dawg, either of which is a superbly appetizing way to eat more avocados.

There’s a very good “original” dawg with sauerkraut, jalapeños and banana peppers, and several other options that I’ll have to try on my next visit. Dawgs & More also won me over with its use of good fresh buns that stand up well to the heavy load of toppings.

Interestingly, whether Dawgs & More catches on and sticks around could come down to the & More, because while the dawgs are all tasty, my very favorite thing on the menu is something called a “beli,” which Dawgs & More advertises on Facebook as being the world’s first patented sandwich. I find it hard to imagine that no one else has ever patented a sandwich, but that doesn’t make the beli any less delicious.

You make a beli by removing the center of what looks (and largely tastes) like a smallish loaf of French bread. Then you backfill with either pulled pork (with cole slaw and baked beans) or Sloppy Joe filling (with cole slaw). Presto! It’s a sandwich you can grip all the way around that doesn’t squirt filling out the sides when you bite into it. Both varieties of filling, the pulled pork and the Sloppy Joe mix, are delicious, and the bread is perfect: not too crusty, not too chewy.

The pulled pork beli, in particular, is like an entire picnic lunch — bread, pulled pork, cole slaw and baked beans — in every bite. It might sound odd, but the taste is sensational. I wondered what happens to the bread that gets removed. I guess you could sell it to a crouton factory, or maybe save it for bread pudding. Is there such a thing as a bread pudding dawg? If anyone could make it work, it’s probably the beautiful minds behind Dawgs & More.

Dawgs & More

Where: 162 W. Center St., Orem

Hours: 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Saturday

Cost: Most entrees $5.95 or less

Info: (801) 874-4842, www.facebook.com/thehawtdawg