A brand new cart affords potatoes topped with just about something you’ll be able to think about.
Photograph: Courtesy of The Potato Bros NYC
There’s maybe no meals extra humble than a baked potato. However pushed by creators just like the U.Okay.’s SpudBros — 4.9 million followers and counting — POV footage of scored, fluffed, and amply topped spuds are throughout TikTok. Baked potatoes are simply as handy as Sweetgreen or Chipotle, and ought to be as prevalent, however solely not too long ago has New York caught as much as the glories of the quick-potato lunch.
Spudz Slope, which was opened by the Syko group in Windsor Terrace final 12 months, affords a alternative of candy potato or traditional for piling with shawarma, birria, bulgogi, or chopped cheese. There’s additionally the Spud Potato kiosk in Bryant Park’s Winter Village, however a potato with butter, beans, and cheese prices $20 there, which makes it arduous to suggest — potatoes ought to be scorching, filling, and inexpensive.
Fortunate, then, {that a} new cart at Cooper Sq. known as the Potato Bros NYC focuses on kumpir, Turkey’s tackle a loaded baked potato. A base mannequin with salt, pepper, butter, and cheese begins at a really affordable $7.90. From there, customization is the purpose: Toppings are tsatsiki, jalapeños, eggs or sausage cooked to order, mushrooms, rooster, and just about the rest you could possibly assume to placed on high of a potato.
Whereas sitting on a bench by the Astor Place dice the opposite day, I flipped open a weighty field to disclose tsatsiki and a facet salad’s price of greens fully obscuring my sliced sausage and the potato beneath. After I lastly received to the potato layer, the place the cheese had already been melted into the fluffy starch, I used to be shocked by an amply utilized do-it-yourself scorching sauce. Every mouthful was a unique chunk, together with the crisp pores and skin that I tore from the facet and dunked into the toppings prefer it was nature’s bread bowl.
Homeowners Yigit Inan and Ata Kilickaya — who’re bros, not brothers — say that on a very good day, they’ll run via 100 Idaho russets. “That is precisely what we wish, however it took a few months to search out these potatoes, as a result of we tried not less than ten,” says Inan of their tater-testing course of. However the current chilly climate has slowed enterprise some. “Proper now, 50 potatoes, 45 potatoes in a day is okay for us,” says Inan. The purchasers who hold lining up? College students, particularly from NYU and Cooper Union, all of whom the homeowners give a reduction, since they have been college students pretty not too long ago themselves — Inan and Kilickaya first received the thought for the cart a number of years in the past whereas they have been at college in Turkey.
On a current chilly afternoon, one gangly man carrying a backpack waited to check out the cart for the primary time. Eventually, it was his flip and he took full benefit of the Bros’ build-whatever-you-want enterprise mannequin: “Can I get a baked potato with cheese, Bolognese, and guacamole?” he requested. Moments later, his order was able to go.
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