There is no ‘best fast food french fry’

(This is Bringing the Heat, an as-often-as-I-feel-like-it feature where I say something that will probably get me yelled at on Twitter.)

My standard McDonald’s order (assuming we aren’t talking breakfast here) is two McDoubles, ketchup and cheese only, and a Coke.

My standard Wendy’s order is a spicy chicken sandwich combo with chili.

My standard Burger King order is … well, okay, nobody ever eats at Burger King, so that’s moot.

The point is, Arby’s excepted, fries are never something I order. And the reason for that? Is that fries are a wildly overrated food. A “best fast food french fries” Google search yields 181 million results. It’s a hot topic. And it absolutely should not be.

Fries are fine! I will never be sad if I order a burger and get fries. But I will also never be excited about them. They’re a perfectly acceptable, perhaps even interesting, side dish, especially to a fast-food burger, but that’s just about it. Taking it any deeper than that is like spending two hours discussing the best King of Queens episode. It was there, it was regularly quasi-pleasant fluff, and that’s all you needed of it, don’t try to go deeper than that.

Now, I will go deeper. (See what I did there? I’m dumb.)

Arby’s is an exception, because curly fries are a whole different animal. Debating standard french fries with curly fries is like debating where Mike Trout ranks on the list of all-time Angels outfielders. Sure, they all have filled nominally the same role, and some of the other candidates were genuinely good, but Trout is just an entirely different beast, and it’s not fair to place them in the same category.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the coin, Chick-fil-A. I don’t choose to eat there, for reasons I would assume are obvious if you know me at all, but it does happen on occasion. And when those occasions arise, one thing I never do is order waffle fries. Because people, come on. Waffle fries are an abomination. They’re the Orlando Palmeiro of this conversation, if you’ll let me carry the Angels outfielders analogy further. The surface area is all wrong, they’re never uniform in their doneness, just stop.

(I will not be addressing sweet potato fries here, because I already used the Orlando Palmeiro comparison and I can’t name that many awful Angels outfielders off the top of my head.)

If you like french fries, great! I like ‘em, too. My waistline can attest to that. A big plate of burger and fries is an excellent meal, and that can range from fast food you grabbed because you didn’t have time to cook all the way up to a nice night at, I don’t know, Ted’s or something (I love Ted’s).

But let’s stop pretending fries have some greater meaning here. There is no “best fast food fry,” because there is really no such thing as a “best fry.” They’re fine. Some are very fine. But putting “best” on there is a classification the entire genre does not deserve. There also isn’t a best King of Queens episode.