Steveats: Buffalo Waffle and Pizza (and Chinese Restaurant) French Fries

Buffalo waffle fries.

Debuting a new, semi-regular feature! I tryout questionable food items so that you don’t have to in… Steveats. (Note: Title developed in about 10 seconds of brainstorming.)

While I have one more food item in the queue to get to at some point next week, I hadn’t received any good suggestions for a “national” sort of food item to try this week. So, let me turn to a food item offered at two local places – Buffalo waffle French fries from the Rhode House at the University of Rhode Island campus, and twisted pizza fries from Filippou’s Twisted Pizza. I do not have calorie information for either of these items, which is probably for the best, because there is no possible way that they are good for my arteries.

Let’s start with the buffalo waffle fries first, since they’re pictured in the photos on this blog entry. They are tasty, since, they’re French fries. However, I found them less satisfactory than the pizza fries. Unfortunately, the buffalo sauce kind of gets absorbed by the potato, and it can make the fries REALLY soggy. And like every other takeout place when it comes to buffalo, the one dipping cup of blue cheese (or ranch, if you’re a monster) just won’t cut it, so you need to pay extra to really enjoy the fries. That being said, even when soggy, the fries are still edible.

Now the pizza fries, they were my favorite item from Filippou’s when I lived near their location in Exeter. They are a completely bizarre food item. Basically, for $5.99 you get a foil take-out pan filled with pasta sauce and French fries, with a bunch of mozzarella cheese melted on the top of it. Again, you absolutely have to eat it with a fork, and it’s almost like a potato lasagna kind of thing. And again, I find it delicious, and during my autopsy they will probably find five pounds of the stuff plastered in my body.

Side note about French fries – I will pretty much always order them when I see them on a menu, because I enjoy seeing how different places prepare them. I know, that’s a very brave stance to take, given how remarkable a food item they are…

Since Steveats typically celebrates the bizarre and the bad, my worst experience ever with this menu philosophy happened at the Bali Village Restaurant on Main Street in Richmond. It’s a Chinese place, and they had French fries and coleslaw on the menu. “Oh, wow! I’ve never seen that on a Chinese food restaurant menu before. I wonder if they have a special preparation or something?”

The answer was… No, no they do not. The fries were clearly the frozen shoestring kind you’d normally get from the Stop and Shop freezer section. And the coleslaw, half of it was brown. Blech. This was more than 10 years ago, and they’ve since moved across the street from their old location and generally seem to have perfectly mediocre Americanized Chinese food. However, I’ll let y’all try the coleslaw and French fries there before I do again.

If you have a request for a future Steveats, leave it in the comments on here or on my Facebook. To check out some of the past Steveats, go here!