Peter Cho knows a thing or two about wet potatoes.
He can spot French fries made from them — in his definition, potatoes holding onto too much moisture, and therefore more difficult to crisp — from across the room. Back at The Breslin, the restaurant at the Ace Hotel New York that he ran before returning to Oregon, and which typically sold 500 orders of fries per day, significant storage space was dedicated just to drying them out.
“Dude, I’m telling you,” Cho tells me after spotting some fries I had picked up at a nearby food cart. “If you go around town to places that are doing homemade fries right now, they’re all going to be wet.”
Despite all that, the Idaho russets Cho and his team are using for the “Thrice Cooked Fries” at Jeju, his wood-fired Korean steakhouse with partner Sun Young Park, appear within an acceptable range of dryness to me. When I first tried them three weeks ago — a last-minute addition to a meal that already included kimchi, kanpachi crudo and a ssam set with steak, pork, ssamjang, buttered rice and lettuce and perilla leaves for wrapping — I was convinced these were the best French fries in town, their soft interior surrounded by crunchy edges so golden brown they glowed orange in the late evening sun.
But don’t take my word for it. Back at The Breslin, the English-style chips that Cho and chef April Bloomfield developed from chef Heston Blumenthal’s influential three-step cooking process were repeatedly named the best French fries not just in New York City, but in the entire country. In 2009, before the restaurant was even open, but after they had started serving food to the hotel’s lobby, the heavily decorated French-born chef Alain Ducasse named The Breslin’s fries the best in New York.
Han Oak owners Peter Cho and Sun Young Park sit inside Jeju just before it opened in 2023. Initially billed as a Korean barbecue restaurant, Jeju now describes itself as a Korean steakhouse, with the bauburger and fries to match.Michael Russell | The Oregonian
I haven’t exactly been craving French fries lately. But after eating some great ones in New York, where I traveled to review Gregory Gourdet’s new restaurant two months ago, I have been thinking about them a lot. Specifically, I keep wondering why so many Portland restaurants — even the ones that make everything else from scratch, where every other vegetable comes from the farmers market — have no issue serving frozen fries?
(The short answer, local chefs say, is the amount of time, space and labor it takes to prepare fries consistently, especially for a side dish most Portlanders expect to cost no more than $7-$8. Meanwhile, frozen fry factories such as Lamb Weston or Ore-Ida have entire research and development teams dedicated to helping restaurants maximizing the crunch restaurants can deliver from starchy sticks of frozen potato.)
Without committing to the sky-high calorie and cholesterol count of a citywide French fry roundup, I’ve been keeping my eye out for restaurants that bother with the multi-stage, multi-day process required to make their own. Over the past few months, I’ve sampled house-made fries from Katy Jane’s Oyster Bar, Lardo, Laurelhurst Market, Potato Champion, Tulip Shop Tavern and more.
But I wasn’t expecting to find fries at Jeju. Turns out, the restaurant underwent a subtle rebrand earlier this year, going from the original whole animal Korean barbecue (with its side of rock star karaoke) to more of a Korean steakhouse. The most notable addition? A baoburger — a cheeseburger fully enclosed in soft, fluffy white dough — and these fries, which Cho makes in the same manner as The Breslin, only with a fryer filled with 25 percent beef tallow
Those fries are hand cut, steamed, frozen, blanched in oil, frozen again, and fried a second time in hotter oil, turning each spear into a marvel of outer crunch and inner mash. A baoburger and fries costs $19, not bad in this age of $25 (and up) hotel restaurant burgers, especially considering the beef all comes from a single cow (paging Jeff Bezos!). That being said, I don’t find the baoburger, which Cho first tinkered with at his since-closed downtown Portland restaurant Toki, to be essential; alone, a side of fries costs $9, or only $1 more than they were at The Breslin 15 years ago. Here they come with a little ramekin of pickle-heavy “secret sauce.”
Cho’s French fry obsession actually began at Bloomfield’s first restaurant, The Spotted Pig, where his first job was to bring buckets of water used to soak potatoes hand-sliced into shoestrings on a French mandolin up from the basement. At Bloomfield’s follow-up restaurant, the goal was to make “really good British-style chips,” with research including an illegal download of a fry-making tutorial video from Blumenthal himself and a visit to his gastropub, The Hind’s Head, in Bray, England. Bloomfield planned to pair the fries with a lamb burger, figuring fewer people would order it than they would beef.
The hardest part of making fries at The Breslin was the sheer scale, Cho said, as the lamb burger and those fries almost instantly became the restaurant’s must-order dishes.
“To make 500 orders a day, every day? That’s really difficult,” Cho said. “And it took a long time. We would go through batches like this where (Bloomfield) would be like, ‘No, this is bad, sorry. And she’d throw away the whole batch, or say, ‘This is for family meal.’”
While Jeju’s fries are several rungs above the Portland competition, a new contender open a few weeks ago. That would be L’Echelle, the new bistro that Luke Dirks was planning to open with the late chef Naomi Pomeroy, and which is now run by Pomeroy’s former right hand, Mika Paredes. Here, stubby, stamped Kennebec potatoes are boiled with vinegar and fried several times, so the edges turn as crisp as a potato chip and the center melts into a silky pommes puree. Some day soon, I’ll have to try L’Echelle’s fries and Jeju’s back to back.
When I visited L’Echelle last week, I mentioned to Dirks that I was idly working on a French fry roundup. Out of the blue, he brought up some of his favorite fries of all time — the ones he ate years ago with a lamb burger at The Breslin.
Jeju serves fries during dinner service from 5 to 9 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday, 626 S.E. Main St., 503-502-2038, jejupdx.com
— Michael Russell; mrussell@oregonian.com