Fritkot Max in Belgium (Photo: Clark Boyd)

Until recently, though, Belgians have mostly kept their frites to themselves. But now some Belgian companies are looking to take the frites shop, or fritkot, as it is called, global.

You can get a true taste of the Belgian love of fries at Fritkot Max in Antwerp. The shop itself is named after a man who started one of Belgium’s first fritkot back in the 1830s.

Behind the counter, Gerda is manning the register and the fryers. She has been working here for a decade, and the customers like to call her “Queen of the Fries.” As she scoops another batch of golden potatoes into the fryer, she waxes poetical.

“You can hear them swimming and singing,” Gerda says. And when you ask what the secret to the perfect frites is, she answers “every day I cook them with love.”

The fritkot is one of the few places you can see Belgians waiting patiently in line. In fact, they visit the fry shop on average about 1.5 times per week.

In Belgium, going to get frites is not a fast-food run, but rather a tradition to be savored.

“It’s the fastest slow food,” says Fritkot Max’s owner Bernard Lefevre. “It’s sometimes difficult for Americans to understand why they have to wait once they order. You need to make people think the Belgian way.”
And what exactly is the Belgian way?

“We like simple and excellent things,” continues Lefevre. “But most of the time, simple things are not easy to make. And with something simple like the potato, well, you discover it’s quite a difficult product.”

This, Lefevre notes, is why past attempts to export the Belgian fry shop experience have not fared so well.

“If you don’t use the right potatoes, the right oil, and the right fryers, well, you get french fries. And that’s the reason you don’t find Belgian fries anywhere.”

There are other reasons too, most of them having to do with the differences between what we think of as “french fries” and true Belgian frites.

First, frites require certain kinds of fresh potatoes. The Belgians prefer to use a local spud called bintje.

Also, true frites are cut thicker; in fact, they are about three times thicker than a McDonald’s fry.

And to be real frites, they need to be fried twice. First to make the inside soft, and a second time to give the outside a nice bite.

And you have to remember that Belgian fries, along with a dipping sauce, are the centerpiece of a meal, not a side-dish.

All in all, it sounds like a tall order to export, but a company called Bel Frit is trying to do just that.

Bel Frit opened its first shop in Hungary eight years ago. It was not exactly a ringing success at first.

“The Hungarian, or the Thai, or the Estonian doesn’t really have a clue at first about what we do,” says Bel Frit’s business development manager Roderick Lindner.

“You have to get them used to the taste, and you do that with a simple, very clear-cut menu.”

Once Bel Frit pared down the menu, the business took off. The company now has shops throughout Eastern Europe, and is looking to expand more into Asia, and even North America.

And Bel Frit’s not the only one trying to bring frites to the world. In Leuven, I meet up with Michel Mes, another entrepreneur who bills himself as “the Missionary of the Belgian Fry.”

Mes worked in IT for 25 years, but never lost sight of his childhood love.

“I used to knick money from my mother’s purse and go down to the fry shop,” Mes says. “Instead of going to church, I went to the fry shop that was next to the Church, and hid behind the fry shop eating my fries.”

In the mid-1990s, Mes started one of the first websites devoted to the Belgian fry.

As the Internet grew, more and more people found his site and began to contact him. They wanted his help in starting their own frites business.

Eventually, he decided to quit the IT business, and start Friitz, a franchising company looking to help others start their own fry shops.

Mes says many people express interest, until he tells them how much work it takes.

“In a nutshell, people think — oh, fry shop. It’s easy. Until I start talking about it, and give them all the little details. And that’s why a lot of people give up.”

Starting a business like this can take months of preparation and market research. And it’s not cheap – it can take tens of thousands of dollars to start a franchise.

But Paul Ilegems , who’s written four books on frites and fritkot , says he believes that the Belgian fry shop can succeed abroad.

“I think all people all over the world like frites,” he says as he sits just outside Fritkot Max in Antwerp.

“The fry is the noblest product derived from the potato. It’s popular, and it will remain so.”

Here are a few hints. It’s a mountainous area, in a chain of peaks that stretches more than 4, 000 miles. These mountains rise above a coastal desert on one side. On the other side of the mountains is the world’s largest tropical forest.

For the Geo Quiz, we want you to identify the mountain chain and the continent where the potato was first farmed thousands of years ago.

The answer is South America, in the Andes Mountains, in an area now occupied by the nations of Peru and Bolivia. That region remains home to the greatest diversity of potatoes on earth.

And it’s a place where scientists are trying to preserve those potatoes, and to help the people who depend on them.

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Pamela Anderson is the director general of the International Potato Center in Lima, Peru. In this audio slideshow she provides a brief and colorful history of the potato in South America.

>>> Click here to start the audio slideshow

Click here to view a photo gallery of Andean potato varieties>>>

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MARCO WERMAN:  For today’s Geo Quiz we wanted to know where in the world potatoes originated.  We asked for the continent and more specifically, the mountain range.  The answer is South America, the continent and the mountain range, the Andes Mountains in an area now occupied by Peru and Bolivia.  The region remains home to the greatest diversity of potatoes on earth and it’s a place where scientists are trying to preserve that diversity.  Here’s one of them.

PAMELA ANDERSON:  My name is Pamela Anderson.  I’m the Director General of the International Potato Center which is headquartered here in Lima, Peru.  In North America and Europe, most of us, when we think of potatoes, think of what we call the white improved potato.  But we estimate that there are five thousand varieties of native potatoes currently grown in farmers’ fields in the Andean chain.  And many of these are so diverse that you wouldn’t recognize them as potatoes if I showed them to you.  They come in all kinds of colors. Yellow, pink, purple, blue, orange, I mean rainbow colors.  Beautiful patterns.  You cut one of them open and it looks like a butterfly on the inside.  They come in all kinds of shapes. They look like little pineapples, eagles’ claws, snakes.  All of these potatoes have names that are [SOUNDS LIKE] Ketchua.  This potato is actually the shape of a puma’s hand and that’s what the Ketchua says, [SOUNDS LIKE] Yama Puka Makin, the hand that belongs to the puma.  So our primary mission here in the Andes is to protect this biodiversity but also to work with the populations in the highlands who continue to grow and utilize these and make sure that as they protect the conservation in the field, they also benefit from these potatoes.  So as an example, last year, Pepsi Co/Frito-Lay who does Lay’s potato chips, came up with a brand new product which was their Lay’s Andeans potatoes.  Those are potato chips made out of the native potatoes from the highlands of Peru. The sales have really shot up exponentially.  They are in all of the major supermarket chains in Lima and moving out into other parts of the country.  This is what it looks like.  You can just see how beautiful the packaging is and that, would you like to taste?  Oh, look at that.  They’re purple, they’re pink, they’re yellow.  They’re lovely.  These are the only potato chips I eat anymore, seriously.  They’re good.

WERMAN:  You can see a slideshow of the unusual potato varieties Pamela Anderson mentioned, including that uncanny puma hand.  The slideshow is at TheWorld.org.  Our interview was produced by The World’s David Barren, with assistance from The International Reporting Project.

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