The dish: Frites

Where to find the best: Brussels, Belgium

Word on the street: Don't blame us when Brussels destroys your tolerance for soggy, limp, or otherwise lacking French fries. Fried potatoes here are no sidekick to a burger—they're the main event, sold in paper cones with a dollop of mayonnaise at little kiosks all over the city. Belgium claims—much to the frustration of the French—to have invented what we know as the French fry. The best frites stands, such as Frit' Flagey (in Place Flagey) or Maison Friterie Antoine (in Place Jourdan), use only Bintje potatoes—a local variety that seems born for the deep-fryer—and cook them twice in clean peanut oil or beef fat (horse fat, thankfully, is no longer used). The result is a batch of impossibly airy, crisp, surprisingly greaseless fries that—whether crowned with mayo, tartar sauce, pineapple-spiked ketchup, or any of the other ten or so sauces offered—will ruin you for the inadequate kind waiting for you back home.

Frit' Flagey
Place Eugène Flagey
Brussels, Belgium

Maison Friterie Antoine
1 Place Jourdan
Brussels, Belgium
Tel: 32 2 230 54 56

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