Tag: restaurant review

On the Road

A Tale of Two Fry Sauces (Well, Three)

I have a bit of a backlog of fry sauce experiences (which makes me concerned for my dietary choices) so I decided to focus on two for this post because they were diametrically opposed. Both were restaurants I had eaten at pre-pandemic and both are locally owned (not a chain).

I had high hopes for Station 22 because I have had great experiences eating there. It has a fantastic energy and unique touches like a wall of specialty sodas. It has a wide array of sauces and was nominated for the fry sauce in particular, but it’s a long, narrow restaurant with little room for spacing out tables so we did the takeout option, which was not an option when I last ate at the restaurant.

Somehow on a Thursday night they were slammed. Understaffed, they didn’t even have time to attend to the folks who walked in, hoping to be seated (or pick up their takeout!). When one guy said he had been waiting for five minutes without anyone acknowledging him, I walked back to the server station to get an update. I felt bad pressuring them when they were so obviously distressed, but I had already paid for my food online an hour prior and we were starved.

We did eventually get sustenance (in about double the promised wait time) with unfortunate substitutions for the pie we ordered and missing biscuits, but the whole thing was a Curbside Cautionary Tale. Even the best dining experience, though, couldn’t have saved that fry sauce.

It was sauce. We put it on our fries. It wasn’t fry sauce. It was more of a honey mustard dressing mixed with a dab of ketchup. I had the fleeting thought that maybe they had made another unfortunate substitution, but I had double checked at the restaurant that this was what they were marketing as fry sauce.

It made me realize that the essence of fry sauce is the mayo. This is a mayo-based sauce and the best sauces highlight that, celebrate that. Station 22’s sauce ran away from its mayo roots and in doing so lost what make it distinctive.

Compare this to Taco Amigo’s extremely light pink sauce. It’s somehow more bland than TopGolf’s fry sauce but it’s also 100% better. This is because it leans in to the mayo. It knows it’s a mayo sauce. I had always thought it was a matter of getting the tang just right (and that can be a factor in fry sauce efficacy) but embracing the bland can be just as powerful. Utah, home of the fry sauce, is much the same way. Don’t discount the bland. The bland is the whole point. Love your pasty white condiments. There is beauty all around–even in the mayonnaise and the white picket fences.

But Taco Amigo isn’t actually the second restaurant in this Tale of Two Fry Sauces (it was a side epiphany in the avalanche of deep friend potato experiences I’ve been having of late). The second restaurant was Seven Brothers in Riverwoods.

I had eaten there once a few years ago and hadn’t fallen in love. I had ordered a burger built for a much larger mouth than I had. I hadn’t ordered fries. I hadn’t gotten fry sauce. So when I had an hour to kill in North Provo at lunchtime I decided to try again. I had lunch in the very socially distant dining area (it was a pretty slow day) at this locally owned burger joint. This time I knew to not let my order exceed my jaw capacity and I had a lovely conversation with my server about their saucing.

They make it fresh every day and go through 3 five-gallon buckets of it on weekdays (four or more on weekend days). It was just mustard, mayo, and ketchup with a chive garnish (unknown ratios). I was not a fan of their distinctive fries, which seemed like the love child of potato chips and potato wedges (forbidden love that is forbidden for a reason) but the sauce…hands down the best of the restaurant sauces. It was perfection. The whole plate was very pretty (the potato love child was nothing if not pretty) and the sauce had just the right amount of tang in just the right amount of bland.

What I am realizing with these local fry sauce adventures is that if a restaurant serves you pre-packaged fry sauce you should brace yourself for mediocrity (I’m looking at you: Chick-Fil-A, Culver’s, Arctic Circle etc). Fry sauce was meant to be mixed fresh. It is the ultimate “mix to taste” item and when it is standardized, it ceases to be fry sauce.

On the Road

On the Road to Fry Sauce: Top Golf

I almost skipped this one. Not the fry sauce–the blog post. Pandemic protocol factored so largely in my first foray that this breech of protocol seemed like something to keep under wraps. But in the interest of being fully transparent I will tell you about this second stop on the road to fry sauce.

I ended up going out with a friend I haven’t seen in a while. She had a gift certificate and I was up for an adventure. All I knew was that it somehow involved golf. After about an hour’s (masked) drive we arrived at a massive structure known as Top Golf, located in Midvale, Utah. Having not been in crowds for about a year, my empathetic heart was momentarily stunned by the pure energy of it all. It wasn’t even that packed of a space, but business seemed to be booming (or so it felt to this hermit).

It was a 1-2 hour wait for a bay (semi-private golfing location–think of the layers of stadium boxes in a basketball arena or baseball field, but the seats are at the back and you get to launch projectiles out the front) so we went to their restaurant, which was as packed as local social distancing regulations would allow. Basically, we were still fairly packed in but we couldn’t overhear the conversations of our fellow diners as well. Though we were only maskless while actively eating, I couldn’t help but think of all of the stuff still hanging in the air was we were ushered to the booth less than a minute after the table (and only the table) was hastily wiped.

But enough of my pandemic panic. What about the fry sauce?? Fry sauce was the only option and the waiter was a little puzzled that I asked about it. I thought perhaps I had just revealed myself as the outsider I surely was, having last played golf as a unit in 7th grade P.E. Back in his day, nobody questioned the condiments. Or, more likely, his inner monologue was “Please stop talking to me. I have ten tables to serve in the next three minutes.”

In either case, the fry sauce was served shortly thereafter, alongside perfectly crisped tater tots. After the obligatory Napoleon Dynamite nod, I dug in. The tots were unparalleled. The fry sauce was the most bland version of fry sauce I have ever tasted. It is best described as lightly tinted mayonnaise. The most compelling reason to eat it is because it is there. As soon as I saw it, I understood why the waiter’s response to my inquiry was befuddlement. It was as ordinary and universal as ice water.

Is this what we have come to, Utah? Fry sauce everywhere and fry sauce nowhere. I prefer it when Utah is flat out weird.