A culinary mystery and a change in perspective on the classic dish.
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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.