This Chicago Tribune article from January 1998 seems to say that the fry wars were very much in play here in Chicago at that time, so my memory seems to be consistent with this.
(Also, odd thing, when I try to paste the above as a lone link, it keeps saying I’ve been logged out and need to refresh the Dope. Every time I return to the thread it kicks me out. I had to go to Drafts to delete it. Tried reposting twice, and eventually came upon the solution of just using the hyperlink function. I guess when the preview is loaded/generated, it somehow hiccups on the Discourse software.)