French Fries for Everyone!: Perfect Potato Is the Latest Single Concept Restaurant to Open in Brooklyn
In today’s kale-eating, smoothie-sipping society, it’s a comfort to know that a restaurant concept structured around deep fried spuds—largely smothered with gobs of melted cheese and rivers of dense brown gravy—still has legs. That would be Perfect Potato in Park Slope, which opened along Fifth Avenue this past June, and specializes in Belgian-style frites transformed into Montreal-inspired poutine, with sun-yellow signage flaunting the exultant motto “French Fries for Everyone!”
Not that the menu makes many concessions to the neighborhood’s Lululemon-clad parents and their Pirate Booty-nibbling youngsters. Save for comparatively acetic baked potatoes and a so-called “vegan poutine,” the eatery unapologetically worships at the respective shrines of salt, sugar, and fat, giddily combining them in countless ways. Rorschachs of grease pattern paper cones cradling twice-cooked fries, which, for $2, can be dunked into some 10-odd specialty sauces, including wasabi mayo, Thai chili lime cashew, coconut curry, and apricot-infused Moroccan tagine.
Then there’s the array of poutines—essentially sustainably sourced KFC bowls—alternating stratums of feathery frites, grass-fed beef bone gravy, and characteristically squeaky Vermont cheese curds, crafted specifically for the store. And that’s just for starters; for three dollars more, you can trick your fries out even further, with a trio of farm-to-market mushrooms, caramelized coins of roast pork, or, courtesy of the all-in “Hangover Cure,” green peas, heirloom tomatoes, sautéed Vidalia onions, over-easy eggs and candied slab bacon.
With your allotted calories for the day already exceeded multiple times over, it’s pointless to attempt to counterbalance your transgressions with water. Might as well go for broke with milkshakes (hey, they’re “natural”), including bourbon pecan, PB&J, and banana cream pie, thick with planks of grilled fruit and molasses-sweet graham cracker crumble, which—if you’re not unduly concerned with your bathing suit body—is pretty close to perfect.
172 5th Avenue, Park Slope