localflavor Al's French Frys provides blast from past

Author: Kelly Janis

Last August, as I was sitting in my hometown Barnes & Noble and fantasizing about my imminent return to Middlebury, I leafed through a sea of Vermont travel guides and compiled a list which, eight months later, reads like a prophetic road map of two semesters' worth of Local News-induced frolicking. On a page in my faithful pocket-sized notebook littered with such legitimate institutions as the Ethan Allen Homestead, the New England Maple Museum and the Mount Independence Historic Site, Al's French Frys in South Burlington is the only prospect to have garnered an excited asterisk. While this is likely more than anything else a function of my highly unrefined culinary inclinations (sorry, Localvores, but who needs feta cheese and wheat berry salad when you can clog your arteries with pizza burgers and mozzarella sticks?), it is no doubt in part attributable to the towering stature by which the unapologetically greasy fast food joint - a throwback to the late-1940s era in which it originated, with red vinyl booths, checkered tiles and the staple tunes blaring overhead - was characterized. The restaurant's fries (or rather, "frys," as Al's prefers to call them) were deemed "legendary," a reputation which its own Web site promotes in its assertion that "it's no exaggeration to say that they are known nationwide."

Visitors to the Seven Days Guide to Vermont Restaurants and Bars Web site - which describes the restaurant as "a scene out of Happy Days" - gushed about the establishment.

"I've never found a French fry that could beat Al's," claimed one devotee.

"There seems to be some mysterious magnetic force pulling my car in whenever I drive nearby," wrote another, a self-proclaimed patron of 50 years and counting.

Other reviews, however, were markedly less glowing.

"This place is way overrated," complained a disgruntled ex-customer. "Worst of all is the herd mentality. You enter into what appears to be stations for cows and when it's your turn the help yells at you, asking, 'What's on the burger?' I felt like I was in line for slop. The burgers are pretty basic and the fries are certainly not worth naming a restaurant after. Skip it. People say they like this place just because they think they're supposed to."

Who to believe? Perplexed, I was forced to indulge in an empty-calorie investigation under the guise of getting to the bottom of the all-important question of Al's true quality.

Immediately after walking through the restaurant's funky glass doors, I was struck by the garnishes of its right-on ambience - old-school straw and ketchup dispensers (the latter of which thoroughly confounded me, given the clumsiness with which I tend to negotiate even familiar, modern-day tests of fine motor skills and common sense), vintage overhead lamps and framed photographs charting the restaurant's evolution over the course of the past six decades.

Although the lighting was dingy and the restaurant was beset by an eerie Monday night lethargy, it was leant energy by its breadth of customers, ranging from the softball team which crowded, giggling, into one of the circular booths, to the two twenty-somethings on a date which appeared to be turning sour, the college student surreptitiously photographing her meal (oh, wait …) and the frazzled father attempting to keep his children's appetites in check.

"Can I have fries for dinner?" the latter's daughter asked.

"No," he said, heaving an exasperated sigh. "You can have food for dinner."

By this same qualification, did my own putative dinner of a cheeseburger ($1.38), lemonade ($1.10) and cup of much-lauded fries ($1.07) register as befitting of the designation of "food"?

The results were mixed. Frankly, the cheeseburgers served in my high school's cafeteria - which may or may not contain meat, vary significantly in texture from week to week and bear an uncanny resemblance to the dishes billed as "chicken" and "fish" - are, on the whole, slightly more exhilarating. That isn't to say that the thin-pattied burger was entirely unsatisfying, per se. Just highly underwhelming.

But, to its credit, the restaurant isn't called Al's Cheeseburgers. It was the fries that I was after - and, boy, did they deliver: warm, crispy, hand-cut, coated with salt and in possession of a certain je ne sais quoi which left me wishing, in the end, that I hadn't cautiously ordered the smallest size available.

Thus, while, unlike last week's Local Flavor selection, Al's French Frys is unlikely to acquire certification from the Green Restaurant Association for "creat[ing] an ecologically sustainable restaurant industry" anytime soon, its remarkably low prices, nostalgia-inducing atmosphere and speedy, efficient service make it a sure bet for anyone in search of a departure from Proctor salad bar fare after a long day in B-Town.