The impulse with sausages is always to go over the top. The act of sausage making is so intrinsically extravagant—the grinding, the smooshing, the wild textural journey—that people just don't know when to quit.

It starts with a little fennel. Why wouldn't you add a little fennel to a sausage, right? Then maybe you throw in some spicy peppers, or rosemary. Next thing you know, your damned sausage is a Thanksgiving dinner, a tube smashed full of cranberries and minced pine nuts and three kinds of cheese, and, if you're lucky, some kind of meat. So restaurants that promise homemade sausages are often a siren's call to disaster, resulting in a sausage frankensteined together from a bunch of foodie buzzwords.

This is not the case—with one notable exception—at the Augustus, a Fremont bar that promises sausage nirvana in a dimly lit, casual setting...

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