On a special day back in March, competitive eater Kevin Thomas Strahle, more commonly known as L.A. Beast, strolled into Serendipity3 on East 60th Street in Manhattan for a date with the restaurant’s potato-based pièce de résistance.
Strahle, who owns multiple Guinness World Records — including most gummy bears eaten with a cocktail stick in one minute (31), fastest time to drink a bottle of maple syrup (10.84 seconds) and most powdered doughnuts eaten in three minutes (nine) — was at the eatery to meet another world-record holder, Serendipity3‘s Crème de la Crème Pomme Frites.
Made from Chipperbec potatoes blanched in Dom Perignon Champagne and J. LeBlanc French Champagne Ardenne vinegar, then fried in pure goose fat from France before being topped with Crete Senesi Pecorino Tartufello and black summer truffles from Italy, the Crème de la Crème Pomme Frites are $200 — and own the title of being the world’s most expensive French fries.
And that’s not all: They are also seasoned with Guerande truffle salt, and served with Mornay sauce made from udder cream, black truffle butter and Gruyere truffled Swiss raclette. All of this is served on a Baccarat crystal Arabesque plate with a sprinkling of 23-karat edible gold dust for good measure.
Unlike most people who take on the financially prohibitive fries (which are not currently on Serendipity3’s permanent menu due to supply chain issues but were available earlier this week in honor of National French Fry Day) Strahle was able to finish his plate and then wash it down with the remainder of the Mornay sauce.
Chef Frederick Schoen-Kiewert, who teamed with chef Joe Calderone to create the dish, has been cooking for nearly three decades. In all that time in the kitchen, he’d never seen someone look quite like Strahle did after he downed the Crème de la Crème Pomme Frites. “He was sweating profusely and his eyes were bulging. There’s so much fat on here in the form of oils and cheese and everything else,” Schoen-Kiewert tells InsideHook. “It was just overload for him. He finished the fries, but I was seriously concerned for his health. I thought he might need to go to a hospital.”
Schoen-Kiewert, who’s tasted every single plate of pricey pommes that have left his kitchen but has never finished an order himself since the restaurant debuted the fries last year, won’t even lodge a guess as to how many calories are present in a serving of crème de la crèmes. “I’m gonna plead the Fifth on that one,” he says.
Your humble narrator, who had the good fortune to sample the fries when they were available earlier in the week, would also be at a loss to guess how much damage to the suggested daily calorie count one of the frites dipped in the Mornay sauce does, but it is definitely severe. The sauce is also the only option for dipping the fries as ketchup is not an option. “We’re never gonna put it the table with these,” Schoen-Kiewert says.
The first word that comes to mind when describing a bite of the fries is rich — and it has nothing to do with the $200 price tag.
Not really soggy despite the onslaught of toppings due to the sturdiness of the thrice-fried Chipperbec potatoes, the fries are cheesy and gooey with hints of nuttiness from the truffles and some slight acidity from the champagne. The gold, which Schoen-Kiewert has to turn off the kitchen fan in order to apply to avoid 23-karat flakes blowing all over the place, adds some sparkle, but little in the way of taste. The same cannot be said for the Mornay sauce, which is delicious. It’s also exceptionally heavy and makes an already nap-inducing meal worthy of seasonal hibernation.
But, whenever the dish is on the menu, no one is sleeping on it as Serendipity3 was completely sold out 48 hours before National French Fry Day even began. “The response has been incredible,” Calderone tells InsideHook. “People have been wanting these French fries and asking us to bring them back and that’s why we did. But we had to limit the amount. The reality of it is it costs more to produce them than we charge. We can only blanch a couple of orders of potatoes in a bottle of Dom Pérignon.”
That being the case, perhaps Crème de la Crème Pomme Frites being a one-day affair, for now, isn’t such a bad thing.
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