A couple months ago I had the unique pleasure of serving as “mom” for a bunch of engineers from my company. We operate in what is known as a distributed workforce. This means that our engineering team consists of people living in about 7 different states. It’s a hiring advantage because we can find people who wouldn’t otherwise want to live in the Bay area, but it’s also a challenge to keep the team unified and ticking. So, we gathered about 15 engineers in a rented mansion in Vegas for a few days to keep things in harmony.
I’m not going to get into the logistical challenges of getting people to and from Vegas, or determining appropriate sleeping arrangements, or eating schedules, or any of that. Just know that it was a great trip and everyone made it home alive. What’s important right here and right now is that I ate some interesting french fries while I was there. It was actually one of the first things that I did.
I had about an hour to kill between picking up the rental minivan (designated driver for-the-win) and actually being able to check-in to the mansion. So, I took a group of the employees to a Japanese influenced burger joint called Fukuburger in Chinatown. So glad I found this spot.
Let’s talk about the mains or a minute. Their burgers hit the same creative spark that I saw at Katsu Burger back home, but these aren’t deep fried. Think wasabi mayo, furikake, fish sauce (?). Whatever is in your burger, you can be confident that it’ll be worth the mess. From what I saw, none of them were a polite meal. I came for the jazz fries, though, and they were also satisfying.
It’s a medium cut fry, and it was crispy enough to hold up for a little while against the brown gravy and “crack sauce”. No clue what that is, but it tasted great. I’d wager it’s a Japanese mayo mixed with garlic. Combined with the brown gravy it could be seen as condiment overload, but I’ll never turn down a good sauce. The little hits of garlic salt stood out as well. it’s a vibrant pinkish orange which was a nice visual against the other sauces and pale yellow fries. Back to the topic of the fries themselves, their crispy shell eventually succumbed to the gravy, but even in their soggy state they were pretty delicious.
I settled on an 8 out of 10 on the rating scale for these fries because they were good, but not mind-blowing good. I should give you bonus points for the weird jelly straws that they gave me, but I’m not feeling overly generous. If you’re in the outskirts of Vegas and need a good burger, I recommend Fukuburger wholeheartedly. You could do so much worse. Given the city that you’re in, you probably have.
Catalog:
Sampled November 2018
The Sodafry 