My work required me to travel to a far and exotic land known to the locals as “Spokane”. You may remember the town from the old Johnny Depp film Benny and Joon. Or, more recently, the Macklemore video for the song Downtown. Honestly, it doesn’t matter how old the footage is, Spokane will look exactly the same.
While watching an obscure sports event (Game 7 of the 2016 World Series…Go Cubs!) I parked myself in the cleanest bar with the most tv’s I could find. Four of the five televisions in front of me were playing the game. The other was playing the Food Network. No one was watching it, but considering the Cubs’ good start we didn’t want to jinx it by changing the channel.
Globe Bar & Kitchen didn’t carry any interesting sodas, but they did have an interesting selection of french fries. After a considerable amount of introspection I settled on the poutine fries, although the pizza fries sounded really interesting.
I’m going to start off with what I found wrong with the poutine fries. Number one, you don’t need to call them “poutine fries”. It’s redundant. Just call it poutine, the fries are implied. Number two, poutine should have cheese curds. Globe claims to use a secret cheese blend which looked a whole lot like bagged three cheese blend shredded cheese. I was really surprised that they didn’t source cheese curds from one of the local creameries…WSU makes a phenomenal cheese called Cougar Gold…I’ll stop complaining. Regardless of tradition, the cheese was good.
As you can see from the picture above, the fries were approximately 10.5 mm thick. I’d put that down as a medium cut. They use a high quality beer battered french fry from Food Services of America. The beer batter is light but provides a crispy-savory crust around the tender potato. I like these fries. A lot. The gravy was also satisfying, but not special. If you told me that it was generic brown gravy from a packet I wouldn’t be surprised. It does the job as a sauce for the fries and mixes well with the cheese. There was also a lot of it.
Overall, the quality of the dish was good enough that I wish I had wide enough arteries to try the other fry varieties. I was tempted to give them a 7, but the beer battered fries boost it to an 8 out of 10.
Catalog:
Sampled on 11/2/2016 in Spokane, Washington
The Sodafry 