Fabled Fries

Hosting kiddy birthday parties is challenging when your kids don’t eat pizza.* That’s why when my son turned 5, we got 10 take-out orders of French fries from Toast, then a new-kid-on-the-block Harlem restaurant specializing in sandwich fare. The 15 kids and we grown-ups attacked the fries like marauding seagulls.

Photo by Daniel S. Burnstein

Fast-forward eight years. My son eats pizza three times a week, Toast has expanded to a new Upper West Side “downtown” locale and the fries haven’t changed one bit—but that’s a good thing. For $4 you get a huge portion that would easily satisfy two hungry adults; and these are quintessential fries, the kind you get at the best boardwalk stands or in a paper cone at a Belgian “frietkot.” Not fat and stodgy steak fries or insubstantial shoestrings, these fries are long, about a quarter-inch thick, with patches of crusty potato skin. Salt them and dip ’em in Toast’s spiced ketchup with its hint of chipotle to kick the flavor up a notch.

Once in Toast, you can’t ignore some of its other offerings, particularly anything with salmon in it—from the fish taco with a slab of grilled salmon ($6) to my favorite, the house-smoked salmon served with capers and herbed mayo on, what else? Toast ($6.95).
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Toast
2737 Broadway (near West 105th Street)
212-663-7010

*Today my daughter turns 10. Happy Birthday Julie!

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