A Reporter on Steak Fries: Tasty Spud or Dud?

Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.

At first, I had nothing more than a rant in mind. It was January, and I had been to two restaurants in the span of a single week that had served me steak fries, first alongside some lamb chops, the second time next to a burger. On both occasions I had felt the instant pang of disappointment, followed by an unhappy sort of wonderment.

Doesn’t everyone hate these things?

Thick, often undercooked and typically without crunch, they hardly seem to qualify as a fry. But I was genuinely curious. I wanted to know what was going on in the mind of the chef who considered steak fries a smart addition to any menu.

This was a perfectly natural sort of inquiry for me because I am the chief French fry correspondent at The New York Times. That was a joke. I write features for the Business desk, and I have written about restaurants on a few occasions. Most recently, I went long on the surprisingly fraught demise of Red Lobster. But one of the pleasures of working at this newspaper is that it is filled with editors on many different desks who will take a pitch from anyone.

In this case, that editor was Brian Gallagher, on the Food desk. “Any interest in a piece about the mysterious persistence of steak fries?” I asked in an email. “I like this!” he wrote back.

My first step was to call David Burke, owner of Park Ave Kitchen in Manhattan, the second of the steak fry-offering restaurants I had visited. He sounded every bit as flummoxed as me. This was the doing of his chef, William Lustberg, he explained.

Soon, Mr. Lustberg joined our call, and then he said something surprising. He had added steak fries to the menu on purpose. Nostalgia was part of it; the steak fry heyday, as far as anyone can tell, had been in the late 1970s and early ’80s, and Mr. Lustberg figured that they were so out of favor now that they were due for a comeback. You should try our Midtown hipster fries, he said, which are topped with Camembert cheese and maple-soaked bacon.

My plan, which was simply to fulminate about steak fries — I imagined a tone poem, filled with rage and starch — was over. Here was a chef who had found redeeming features in steak fries, and was showcasing them in a novel way. This left open the possibility that he wasn’t alone. Maybe my article should be about the rum band of chefs who were proud to serve the world’s least loved French fry.

Before going further, I had to determine whether my distaste for steak fries was a personal quirk or a widely shared opinion. So I called Sysco, the Houston-based food giant, which sells to restaurants, hospitals and just about everywhere else. I found myself on a Zoom call with Neil Doherty, the company’s senior director of global culinary strategy. Sysco offers a steak fry, he said, and it is either dead last or close to it on sales ranking lists in the United States. It has a following among people who want the taste of potato rather than crispy coating.

“That’s why steak fries are still big in the U.K. and Ireland,” said Mr. Doherty, “especially in bars and in fish-and-chip land.”

Get in touch with someone at Red Robin, he suggested, referring to a burger chain of nearly 500 restaurants that has long put steak fries at the forefront of its menu.

About a week later, I took a bus from Manhattan to Secaucus, N.J., and met Andrew Birkbeck, a Red Robin culinary product developer, who’d flown in from the company’s headquarters in Greenwood Village, Colo. In a test kitchen there, he said, he and two other recipe developers spend their days in culinary mad scientist mode, whipping up new menu items, which include different sauces for steak fries.

He fried up a batch and we sat at a table dunking them into the sauces. The appeal was instantly, blazingly clear. Simply putting salt and ketchup on steak fries is to miss their point. They are designed to carry big, bold flavors.

Three days after this tasting my brain was still occasionally firing neurons bearing a message. “Go back to Red Robin,” it said. “Eat steak fries.”

The next week I returned to Park Ave Kitchen and tried Chef Lustberg’s so-called hipster fries. Obviously the name is a terrible idea, but the pile of ingredients atop the dish, in tandem with the fries, proved irresistible.

I am still convinced that the undercooked steak fry, with a bit of salt and ketchup, is a disaster. But that is not the fault of the steak fries. It’s the fault of chefs.

When my article was published, steak fry fans showed up by the dozens in the comments section and in my inbox. One contested the very premise of my story.

“This article must be a hoax,” wrote someone identified as Corey, who then helpfully hinted at a solid idea for a follow-up article. “Seasoned curly fries are an abomination.”