(Photo: Levi Brown)

• The Farm on Adderley

  1108 Cortelyou Rd., Ditmas Park, Brooklyn; 718-287-3101

  In the realm of French fries, as in life, looks can be deceiving: Those pommes frites stacked up in a bountiful pile beside your hanger steak might be tall, dark, and handsome, but one bite exposes them as the limp and flavorless impostors they all too often are. That’s not the case at the Farm on Adderley, the rustic new Ditmas Park hangout where chef Tom Kearney takes his fries so seriously, he’s perfected the technique for achieving not only the ideal golden sheen but the quintessential crunch. In the Belgian tradition, Kearney fries his skin-on, hand-cut Idahos twice—first at 300 degrees, then at 340, though he’s been known to go down as low as a nearly unheard-of 325. The lower the temperature, he postulates, the slower they cook, the more water evaporates, and the better the caramelization, color, and crispiness. Despite the school of thought among some chefs that dirty oil, full of unidentified particulate matter, makes for crispier fries, Kearney keeps his canola oil pristine. The curry mayo he serves alongside is tasty, too, but, to Kearney’s credit, entirely irrelevant.

From the 2007 Best of New York issue of New York Magazine