No wonder, given the description above!
King George Diner in Wayne- best disco fries ever!
Incidentally, at the Au pied de cochon restaurant in Montreal, chef Martin Picard suggests a foie gras poutine, which is supposed to be awesome – at $23 CDN a portion, it better be!
Johnny, think your SoCal rooted chili fries could top THAT?
The one ingredient I still don’t get in poutine – I did manage to consume quite a few since it was invented – is the traditional gravy, which seems fairly bland to me. But, all in all, a nice treat once in a while.
(BTW, to suggest replacing curds with mozzarella is pure heresy, as any Québécois will tell you)
You really shouldn’t have voted then. Based on posts like this I’m inclined to consider half of the votes in favor of chili-cheese fries to be invalid.
I’ve had poutine only recently for the first time. I liked it, but the gravy was unbelievably salty. Maybe that’s not always the case.
Good poutine gravy is salty, at least IMHO. Then again, I tend to want to add salt to everything!
My poutine experience has only been skiing into a food hut on Mt Saint Anne in Quebec in single digit weather. And perhaps the cold and the exercise biased the taste buds some. But dang. No chili cheese fries ever tasted good.
I refuse to have it elsewhere out of respect for the memory.
Unless you’ve left Toronto without telling us, take a gander at Smoke’s, which Leaffan linked to. It’s a Toronto-based chain that set out to create “authentic” poutine (importing the curds from the Eastern Townships, for instance). I’m no connosseur, but even my Quebecois friends grudgingly admit that it’s at least in the same league as the best that Quebec has to offer. They’ve got a location in Mont Tremblant that hasn’t been the subject of pitchfork bearing villager protests, so it appears that they can even survive in La Belle Province.
It’s not his fault the OP didn’t provide him a valid option or specify that you had to have tried both to vote. If you want a good poll, it’s up to you to make sure you are clear, not depending on everybody to understand the unspoken assumptions. IT doesn’t matter how obvious you think it should be.
If you have to disregard any part of a poll, you have to discard all of it. There may be people who have never tried chili cheese fries, or people who have, decided they don’t like it, and thus voted for Poutine.
As for me–I know I don’t like cheese curds, nor salty gravy. But I also know I don’t like chili with fries. I actually think the “bad poutine” described by **Lissla **sounds better (as I assume the gravy mix isn’t going to be salty.)
And, no, I didn’t vote–but mostly because I can’t decide which is worse. I probably wouldn’t have voted even if I did think chili fries were good though. But I don’t expect others to work under the same assumption.
(And the chili in chili fries [or any other solid food with chili added] is usually quite meat heavy, to the point that the beans may actually be missing. If it’s otherwise still the tomato-y thick consistency, with the spices and general flavor, it’s still a type of chili: meat chili [as opposed to chili con carne, which is bean chili with meat].)
How can there even be any discussion here? I mean, where is the chili in poutine? Brown gravy ain’t no substitute. Have you ever had a gravy dog?! I rest my case.
This, more or less. Except I get it any time I visit Quebec (usually Montreal).
Perhaps this boils down to yet another East Coast vs. West Coast, Northeast vs. Southwest USA back-and-forths of “you’ve never had REAL pizza/bagels/clam chowder” (“and YOU’VE never had REAL chili/burritos/salsa”) … “over THERE, or we wouldn’t be having this discussion.” But the fact remains, while I do like chili I don’t have any memories of eye-opening, will-never-forget-it experiences about eating it, but definitely do for poutine.
First time I ever had chili fries? Eh. I couldn’t tell you, really, but my basic impression of it doesn’t change with any sampling: it’s kinda like having nachos but with french fries as the base, and the fries get soggy way too quickly, which kinda ruins the point of having fries at all. Might as well have the chili with nachos or on a roll like a sloppy joe. Could be from a can of Hormel or not, I’d probably notice the difference between that and fast-food level chili or homemade, but it’d be a difference more of noticing effort and better quality ingredients than actually going from shrug to worship.
But poutine, that first time I had it, ah!, that is a memory. I came in to a Quebec ski chalet in 1990 after skiing in well below freezing night-time temperatures, and asked in my never-field-tested-before French (after 2 years of classrooms) what “poutine” was. After few moments of thinking, I got the response, “Eh, la poutine, c’est… Des frites, au sauce, et au fromage… (shrug, hand wave) Il faut l’essayer!” (Well, it’s… Fries, with gravy, and with cheese, and… you’ll have to try it!") And so what were they? Really hot, crispy fries covered in tangy, salty gravy and the melted cheese curds that IS NOT mozzarella cheese even if they sorta look like it, eaten quickly so the gravy doesn’t sog the fries, hot hot hot it’s burning my mouth a little, but I… just… gotta… eat… more.
I actually don’t like chili all that much. I’ll eat it, but it’s kind of meh to me all around.
I’ve had really good poutine at this lovely little cafe in downtown Montreal - there is no match. The SO makes it pretty well, too.
Poutine, hands down.
BTW, that’s not to dismiss out of hand the Southwest’s claim that “it’s not to compare” for local Mexican or Tex-Mex food versus what we get shipped to the Northeast (though Mexicans have gone from nearly invisible to the fastest-growing Hispanic sub-group in NYC since the mid 1990s, so I hope for that to change). My trip to Tucson about 2 years ago was deeply memorable for the food, starting with the *huevos rancheros *(made with egg whites by request) served at my hotel breakfast, and then it just kept on getting better.
I remember having a burrito that was simply the best… burrito… I’d ever had, not in San Francisco (where I’ve had some good ones) but of all places, in the cafeteria of the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum outside of Tucson when I visited there about 2 years ago. At least, up until that point of my life. Later that day we had dinner in a restaurant I picked from a list of recommended places in Tucson, Cafe Poca Cosa, and it was, to me, pilgrimage-level quality food. If I am ever in Tucson again, or within 2 HOURS of driving distance, I will visit this place.
Even the fast food burritos were good. I don’t remember the name of the place but it looked kinda like a cross between a Chick-Fil-A and a Taco Bell, except they also sold fried chicken by the piece, as well as burritos and tacos, and I found it very tasty.
But back to the topic of the OP, we’re not talking about restaurant quality food here, but diner food, fast food, ballpark food, food sold at a stand or a cart. And based on my eye-opening experiences with the Mexican food in Tucson I could theoretically see having a similiarly “nigh-religious experience” regarding chili, and maybe even on really good corn tortilla chips (nachos). But I still wouldn’t think of it as ideally suited to french fries due to the sog factor, plus the flavors of chili vs. french fried potatoes just don’t seem complementary to me, in a way where the combo becomes something more than the sum of two individual components (I wouldn’t particularly care for chili on baked potato, either, for example).
Chili belongs on a baked potato!
I agree ; and poutine is great in it’s own right. However, off to the sidelines, is a contender that beats chili-cheese fries hands down:
OK, that just started me drooling. I know what’s for dinner Thursday night.
silenus, let us know how it turns out for you. My wife is away, so I’ll wait until the weekend to cook up a batch for us.
Nonsense. It’s a given that you need to be familiar with both to vote. If, for example, I’ve listened to plenty of The Beatles but am unfamiliar with Simon and Garfunkel, I have no business voting in this poll. I don’t need a third option on that poll indicating that I’m not familiar with both; I just refrain from voting at all. It’s silly to demand that every OP essentially paste a boilerplate “don’t vote unless you know what the hell we’re talking about” instruction into every single poll on the board.
I know this is getting under my skin more than it should, but skewing polls with an “I have nothing to say but insist on saying something anyway” attitude is IMO borderline threadshitting.
Chili on a potato is good, but not quite as good as chili without the potato.
Although I may have thought about it once or twice, I have never brought myself to eat a bowl of gravy and cheese by itself.
So I vote for poutine.
IMO, Chili-Cheese fries–with onions and red chili pepper flakes-- are much better than Poutine. Contrary to what has been said in this thread, Chili (without beans) makes everything better, to include fries, hot dogs and omelets. I suspect that it’s a cultural thing. Poutine is okay, but a little bland for my tastes.
Disco fries would come in between the two.