At Mission District vinyl bar-slash-restaurant Side A, chef Parker Brown lavishes attention on every detail of his Instagram-famous (opens in new tab) burger. A hefty, half-pound patty, it’s layered with melted goat cheese — from a local producer, of course — then buried under housemade sweet onion jam. On the side: slow-roasted marrow meant to be scraped from the bone and slathered on top.
The fries that accompany this behemoth, however?
“Anyone who knows me or who has worked with me knows that I’m team frozen fry for sure,” Brown says.
In theory, the best house-made french fries should outshine the best frozen ones. But in Side A’s narrow, open kitchen, there’s not enough square footage to store crates of potatoes, let alone accommodate a station to transform them into crunchy-fluffy matchsticks. “It’s just an unrealistic expectation for the quality that we want: something crispy that tastes the same every time,” he says.
The decision came down to practicality over craft. Side A’s curly fries are not intended to be a signature item; they’re merely a satisfying side or an excuse to order another glass of wine. And since the restaurant goes through at least a case per day, there’s no way his staff could maintain high quality while keeping up with demand. Consistency is everything, Brown says. “I just can’t risk the mistake.”
Brown, who worked at Michelin-starred seafood restaurant Aphotic before opening Side A with his wife Caroline Brown in 2025, isn’t the only San Francisco chef choosing frozen fries over fresh ones. Even in the city that made farm-to-table its calling card, restaurants including Mexico City-inspired Equal Parts in North Beach, American bistro Perry’s on the Embarcadero, and SF’s famous late-night burger haunt Sam’s all prioritize the easy consistency of frozen fries over the painstaking work of making them.
At Scoma’s, the waterfront restaurant known for cioppino and crab cakes, culinary director Gordon Drysdale has been serving Lamb Weston fries for more than two decades. “They’re more reliably consistent,” he says, noting that Kennebec potatoes (the ideal spuds for fry-making) require time to “cure,” a process where the starches in the tuber convert into sugar. If rushed, the fries will brown before they’re completely cooked, “so they’re either the right color or limp.”
Chef Jason Halverson of the Hi Neighbor Hospitality Group — the team behind Vault Steakhouse, Vault Garden, Trestle, and 7 Adams — is also a fan of frozen. Having toiled in restaurants that make their own, Halverson says most kitchens have to employ one person solely for fry production. That cook must first wash the potatoes, shape them, then steam and freeze them before finally dropping them into vats of hot oil.
For Halverson, paying someone $22 per hour to produce a single item doesn’t make sense. “Is it worth someone’s time to do that every single day, when what I’m really shooting for is consistency?” Halverson says. “I don’t want flabby fries. I want hot, crunchy, fucking fries.”
There are exceptions. A handful of restaurants — including Bix, Nopa, and Zuni Cafe, where the shoestring fries are the stuff of local legend — have concluded the labor is worth it. But their fries may explain why so few others bother.
At Zuni, the single cook who runs the fry station is often referred to as “the fry whisperer,” says chef Ken Turner, who worked there for years. To shape its potatoes into slender batons, Zuni uses an upright press, the same piece of equipment that teenagers in white hats operate at In-N-Out. The fry whisperer submerges them in water, then dunks them in hot soybean oil. (The restaurant switched from peanut oil, in part to accommodate diners with allergies.)
To achieve a crispy, perfect fry, Zuni pays close attention to the color of the oil and the size of the potato strings. Too light, and the fries look undercooked. Darker bronze, and the oil is likely rancid and will impart a terrible flavor. The mesh wires used on the press are just as important. There can’t be any slots bigger or smaller than the others, as any misshapen fries would come out either over- or undercooked. “We basically kind of gate-kept those and grabbed as many of them as possible because they’re kind of hard to get,” Turner says.
Still, for many chefs, a great french fry isn’t a test of culinary ambition. It’s one of the few menu items where reliability matters more than originality. “I go to a bar or restaurant to order fries so that I can scratch an itch,” Brown says. “I’m not there to be impressed by the fries. I’m there to feel that nostalgia.”
Ironically, the surest way to deliver that feeling may be from the freezer.
此内容由惯性聚合(RSS阅读器)自动聚合整理，仅供阅读参考。 原文来自 — 版权归原作者所有。