Frites: 2 out of 5 stars, City: 5 out of 5
About the author: Ky Friedman ’23 is an FSI The Europe Center Global Policy Intern with the Centre for European Policy Studies. Ky is currently an Engineering Physics major at Stanford University.
By no means am I looking to incite any sort of culinary conflict or gastronomic grapple, but I’m going to make a controversial public statement: frites are served too hot and under-salted; they are in general not as good as a standard French fry in the US.
I, a connoisseur of fast food and restaurant French fries with nearly 20 years of French fry eating experience, was sadly disappointed that first Wednesday night, sitting outside a glowing friterie in northern Brussels which had made bold promises in French to the quality and deliciousness of its product.
After weeks of trying different friteries across the country, I found a few that were pretty solid, but none that even achieved what I would have expected at a decent sit-down burger-joint in Los Angeles. Was this the culture shock I was told about? Was this the American elitism rearing its ugly head? Am I a bad person for not liking Belgian frites???
As these questions overwhelmed me, I realized the source of my confusion. I was muddled at why these seemingly inert snacks had been promoted to me as a highlight of Brussels. No one had told me about the beautiful flowers that draped between old, mismatched buildings in the jagged streets. No one told me about the rich jazz scene that occupies secret pockets of music each weekend. No one told me about the friendliness of the city that shines through no matter which of the 100+ languages you might hear through the city. So why had I heard so much about the fries?
Well, the same reason I had heard so much about crepes and escargot before visiting France. The urge to share the same experience as others runs deep, and it’s deepened when we consider our desire to share in the same experience as another separated by thousands of miles and potentially years. Someone who lives in Stockholm who had fries at Frit Flagey in 1998 knows exactly how the fries tasted when a kid from California ate them in 2023. It’s a special feeling to share that, to be able to know virtually nothing about another person but know the sensation of one of their experiences, no matter how small. But no one can experience the exact same laughter as I did sitting across from George, Lauren, Devan, and Harry while I bit into a pasteis de nata outside a bar in Chatelain. They won’t know the feeling of walking across Brussels alone at night, the sky still lighting my way home from a random escapade to get pizza at a five-table pizza restaurant in Ixelles. Odds are I’m the only person who will ever know the excitement of finding an old Pirelli Tires hat in a bucket of hats at the Melting Pot Thrift store in Marollen.
But anyone who ate at Frit Flagey can feel that intertemporal and interspatial human connection, to know the feeling of even a little bit of my experience in Brussels. Even if the fries were just okay.
