I don't get excited about French fries.
Never have. For me, French fries are the filler.
An afterthought. They're what you eat because you're still hungry but don't have
another cheeseburger. So when I heard there was a 10-week wait to try Serendipity
3's latest Guinness World Record-setting plate of fries, I had to try them.
There's no way a $200 plate of French fries could elicit a milquetoast response.
Either they're going to be one of the best things I've ever eaten or deserving of a
Pete Wells Guy Fieri-style takedown.
Why do these fries exist?
Why are they so expensive?
Why are they served on a crystal plate?
Why do you have to wait two months to try them?
Just because something's expensive doesn't mean it's Worth The Money.
If you're going to sell a plate of $200 French fries, they better be good.
The creme de la creme pommes frite at Serendipity 3 are the brainchild of these
two guys, Joe and Freddy, the creative director and head chef.
They wanted to create a dish to gin up some post-pandemic buzz for the restaurant that
was once a favorite of Andy Warhol and Marilyn Monroe.
The ingredients that make up the world's most expensive plate of French fries is a
foodies wish list.
And for $200, it should be.
These fries are made from Chipperbeck potatoes blanched in Dom Perignon champagne
and French champagne vinegar.
They're twice cooked in pure goose fat from cage-free geese raised in southwest France.
The mornay sauce is made from udder cream from A2 grass-fed Jersey cows.
And seasoned with black truffle butter and a trio of truffled cheeses.
So what's the first thing I should look for in this?
Like, explain this to me.
First thing we have to take in the beauty of the plate.
I don't think we'll be needing this.
No, definitely not for these.
And we're missing one more item.
There's something about eating gold that feels wrong, but it's pretty awesome.
Let's try them.
Well, let's try.
Enough talking.
I got to eat one.
I got to try one of these guys.
Oh, dip it right in there.
You taste the Dom Perignon in those French fries?
This is the best junk food I've ever had in my entire life.
Me, too.
So Andy Warhol used to come here.
Yes.
Andy would come here.
He started coming here when the place first opened, when he wasn't even famous.
And he was an illustrator.
And he would...
This is about the time I stopped paying attention to Joe.
The truffles, goose fat, salt and cheeses just started drowning everything out.
It was sensory overload.
Original Andy Warhol's for $20.
I'm not going to lie.
I didn't pay attention. I was eating it.
I was so good.
I didn't mean to do. Oh, my gosh.
When you cover the restaurant industry, you realize how you have to kind of drum up
business and things like that. So people will come up with items that, you know, get
a big splash, but they never really do anything.
And that's why I asked you about the $200 plate because we've done the most expensive
Thanksgiving ever. But it's, like, with a Rolex and a thing.
And then the meat or whatever is only, you know, a couple hundred bucks.
You don't take the plate with you in this one, right?
This is just $200 for this.
And so I would ask, like, is it more the ingredients that are expensive or is it the
process? Here, it's both.
But I wanted to hear from the chef himself about what happens to these Chipperbeck
potatoes blanched in a 2006 bottle of Dom Perignon.
I've never heard blanching potatoes in a $500 bottle of wine.
What does that do?
We're developing flavor and complexity behind it.
So in a typical setting, we would use acidulated water.
In our case, we're using, you know, Dom Perignon as our water and we're using a
French champagne vinegar as our acid flavor to that.
By doing this technique, we're rinsing it off sugars which is going to inhibit from
over-browning. We're preserving the pectin inside which is going to keep the cell
structures intact.
And by doing a thrice cooked technique, meaning the blanch and the Dom Perignon
into a fry, and goose fat like you said from France.
At 325° and later at 375°, we are creating a beautiful, crispy exterior with a fluffy
interior.
Let me walk you through this real quick though.
So, why blanch and then make them cold?
The idea of that is we wanted to cool down, one.
And the second one we wanted to develop what we call a pellicle.
A pellicle is creating a skin on the exterior of the fry that's going to, again,
create that that firm crispy texture on the outside.
So you go blanch.
Cold.
Blanch.
Cold. Fry.
In goose fat? In goose fat.
Not duck fat. Goose fat.
Goose fat. Why goose fat?
Because it's beautiful. It's crazy.
It is over the top. And, you know, not for nothing, it has a lot of flavor to it.
And that's just the potatoes.
We haven't even gotten to the mornay sauce, which is made from locally sourced cream so
thick can't even pour it in a trio of truffle cheeses.
Raclette, Gruyere and pecorino.
But what we do is we use a truffle butter and we have flour.
We're going to mix that together.
That's our roux. We want to toast that out.
And then that point in which we add cream to it, which, you know, we're using a heavy
cream. It's an A2 cream from udder.
I saw your cream does not look like cream.
You can't even import it. You have to literally spoon it into the pot.
It's phenomenonal. So by adding the cream into the roux mixture, it becomes a
béchamel. At which point then after the fact, we'll add our French Raclette.
Truffled Raclette into the béchamel.
Now it becomes a mornay sauce.
And from there, we'll season it with truffle salt and then we're going to pour
into our Baccarat bowl. This is certainly, you know, the first fries I've ever had to
utilize tweezers.
I'm not going to lie, I came here wanting to hate this because I just think it's
ridiculous to spend that much.
Like, you could get an amazing piece of meat or something.
But I have to say, I'm going to remember these French fries for a really long time.
I had this idea in my head of like, you know, this was going to be just this
gimmick just to get the Guinness.
And maybe part of it is, I don't know.
But I know something really good when I see it and you can't eat this whole thing.
And I could imagine sitting here with five friends with $50 to spend and say, "Hey,
let's split some of these." But there's a wait list?
There's a wait list.
It exploded.
People want it.
I really wanted to hate these French fries, but they're an homage to everything I love
about food.
They're meant to be shared and discussed and fought and drooled over.
This is high end food for the people, expensive enough to be prohibitive, but not
so ridiculous that they're out of reach for a special occasion like, say, the end
of a pandemic.
Dude, I'm going to dream about these fries.