Steak fries. Two words, so promising apart, so dreadful together.
Plank-like in shape and wan in complexion, they sit uncomfortably between genus “fry” and genus “baked potato,” lacking the crunch of the former and the richness of the latter. So totally have they lost the war for the American palette that every encounter with a steak fry is like meeting a Visigoth.
One gapes and wonders, how are you still here?
That question sprang to mind during a recent visit to Park Ave Kitchen by David Burke, a Midtown restaurant that, despite the name, is on Lexington Avenue. Steak fries are rarely spotted these days at upscale venues, and Park Ave Kitchen has a considered, of-the-moment menu, with entrees like bison short ribs and black sea bass tikka masala.
“I noticed them two weeks ago,” said the owner David Burke, on the phone one recent afternoon. “I was at the restaurant and I said, ‘What’s with the steak fries?’”
He had originally posed the question to Park Ave Kitchen’s chef, William Lustberg, but rather than paraphrase his answer, Mr. Burke suggested we get the guy on the phone.
Thirty seconds later, Mr. Lustberg had joined the call.
“They’re just not as common any more and I think they should be,” he said, sounding anything but defensive. “I would love to be part of bringing back steak fries.”
That’s going to be a chore. The U.S. market for French fries is expected to reach $10 billion next year, and on the list of favorite variants — there are at least 30 — steak fries rank at or near the bottom, way behind the ubiquitous straight cuts, crinkle cuts and waffle cuts. Among wholesale distributors, they command a mere 2 percent of the total fry market by pound, according to Circana, a market research company.
This is a product long past its heyday. Steak fries were a staple of chains like the Ground Round, a Howard Johnson’s offshoot and children’s party mecca beloved for a menu overstuffed with mid-price American fare as well as its free peanuts, the shells of which could be tossed on the floor.
The Ground Round filed for bankruptcy in 2004 and its intellectual property rights were purchased in 2023 by the husband and wife team of Joe and Nachi Shea. The couple are about to open a Ground Round in Shrewsbury, Ma., and the logo and color scheme are back, as is ice cream in miniature baseball helmets. The peanuts are gone. So are the steak fries.
“Honestly, it wasn’t even a consideration,” said Joe Shea in a phone interview. “We are really engaged with our guests and we’ve been doing polling and asked, ‘What would you like to see on the menu?’ And not a single person mentioned steak fries.”
The sinking profile of steak fries is, in part, a matter of economics, said Neil Doherty, senior director of global culinary strategy at Sysco, the food supply giant. Because of their bulk, steak fries don’t cover the plate very well, which means the appearance of a hearty serving costs more. Steak fries also have what he called “poor hold time,” a polite way of saying they get soggy fast and must be tossed out sooner.
New fry varieties have debuted in recent years, pushing steak fries even further down the list. Sysco alone has created red battered jumbo crinkle cuts and something called imperial swirl fries, which have a “distinctive ‘lock washer’ shape,” according to the company’s website.
Then there’s the matter of tastes, which have evolved from the era when prime rib and baked potatoes were a standard pairing.
“The steak fry was perfect for people in the ’70s and ’80s who really liked that potato feel,” said Mr. Doherty.
When steak fries turn up in restaurants today it often feels as though management forgot to think about which fry to serve.
But look hard enough, and pockets of hardcore steak fry partisans can be found around the country. In Cheyenne, Wyo., there’s 2 Doors Down. When it opened in 2009, the owner and operator, Jerry Inniss, asked two French fry distributors to audition their wares, and issued a special instruction. Bring steak fries and nothing else.
Mostly, he wanted to stand out with a unique offering, he said. Before opening, he spent two weeks in a kitchen, devising what he calls a proprietary mix of spices. He won’t discuss it, other than to say it’s reddish brown in hue and that diners often ask for a side order of it.
“They might want to add it to their burger,” he said. “They might be taking it home to season other things. I don’t know.”
A bottomless order of these fries costs $5.25, and Mr. Inniss sells a ton and a half of them a week. They have become a menu centerpiece, anointed Wyoming’s best fries by Business Insider in 2016 and regularly winning the Wyoming Tribune Eagle’s “Best of the Best” plaque for fries.
For sheer steak fry ardor, though, there’s no beating Red Robin, the national burger chain, based in Greenwood, Colo. The company operates and franchises nearly 500 restaurants in the United States and Canada, and every one of them is avidly waving the steak fry banner. Three people in the company’s product development kitchen spend much of their day conceiving new sauces in which to dunk those fries.
Not all of them leave the test area.
“We tried beer cheese and barbecue sauce and burnt ends, on steak fries,” said Andrew Birkbeck, a Red Robin culinary product developer. “Didn’t work.”
Mr. Birkbeck was standing in the kitchen of the Red Robin in Secaucus, N.J., at 10 a.m. one recent Saturday. He’d flown in from Colorado to fry up a batch of steak fries and show off the chain’s most popular sauces. He fried them for five minutes in soybean oil and then threw them in a basket and carried them to a table in the dining room, where he had set up a flight of sauces.
“All right, starting here, this is our signature Whiskey River BBQ sauce,” he said, going clockwise around a small plate. “Next to it, that is our sweet and spicy ketchup that we make in house. Has cayenne, garlic, sugar and vinegar in it. Then we have our campfire mayo, which is barbecue sauce and mayonnaise, then our housemade ranch dressing, and finally our poppy seed honey mustard.”
Dunk a salted, fried potato in these sauces and your head will spin, blissfully. Amid this riot of flavor, the upside of a steak fry becomes obvious. It is basically a sauce delivery vehicle, an edible spoon. Serving steak fries with nothing more than salt and pepper misunderstands their purpose and highest, best use.
Maybe the steak fry never failed us. Maybe we failed the steak fry.
Exactly, said Mr. Lustberg, the chef, one evening in mid March back at Park Ave Kitchen. Wearing chef’s whites and a New York Rangers cap, he was seated in front of a silver serving pan filled with $18 Midtown hipster fries, as the restaurant calls them.
He had nostalgia in mind when he added steak fries to the menu in January, but this dish is squarely in the more-is-better school of contemporary cooking. The fries are buried under Camembert, grated Parmesan, charred shishito peppers, parsley, chile oil and bacon cured with maple syrup.
“And those are slices of preserved lemon,” he said, with evident pride, “because you need some bits of acidity.”
This ensemble of ingredients proves that as a solo act, steak fries are decidedly underwhelming. In a symphony, they shine.
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