How to Eat Steak Frites Like the French

La Maison de l'Aubrac’s steak. — Credit:
Courtesy of La Maison de l'Aubrac

In France, there are few dishes as ubiquitous as steak frites. It’s a dish served at both brasseries and Michelin-starred restaurants. It’s on the menu enfant (kids’ menu) and it’s a plat principal (main course) for adult diners. There are even restaurants in Paris that dedicate everything to this one simple dish.

The steak cut is typically a bavette, sometimes a rib eye, New York strip, or filet mignon, and it’s always drenched in a rich sauce and served with a healthy mountain of crispy fries. It doesn’t matter how you order it, but it does matter how you eat it … and that’s because there is a right way (and a wrong way) to eat steak frites.

To the untrained eye, the dish may look like “steak with a side of French fries,” but believing that would be your first mistake. To the French, it’s not just one thing.

“It’s the combination,” explains Sébastien Giannini, maître artisan and partner chef at L’Avant-Garde in Washington, D.C., who grew up eating steak frites as a kid from his home in the South of France and has now cooked the dish for visiting presidents, diplomats, and diners from around the world at his celebrated Georgetown restaurant.

“When you dream about a steak frites, it’s a nice piece of meat with an amazing sauce,” he says, “like a peppercorn sauce or shallot sauce, and you need to have the juice of the meat and the crisp from the fries all mixed with the sauce that you have on the top. You cut the fries and pick them up with a fork, put them through the sauce, and eat with a little bit of steak. It’s amazing, this mix.”

Like most French kids, Giannini was taught early on about the proper way to eat a steak frites. Fork in one hand, knife in the other — not a bottle of ketchup or mayonnaise in sight. To him, it was never about the rules; it was, instead, a way to maximize the pleasure of each bite. A fork delivers the perfect mix of salty, saucy, and meaty, with a textural crisp from the fries.

I sat down with chef Giannini, who is also president of Disciples Escoffier USA (a nonprofit organization that continues the legacy of French cooking techniques and cultural traditions in America), to uncover the unspoken rules of eating a proper steak frites the French way.

Rule No. 1: Forks are for fries, fingers are for pain (bread)

This seemingly contradictory rule comes down to the deeply cultural French belief that hands should remain clean and oil-free while at the table. Fries = greasy, bread = dry. “You always use a fork,” Giannini says about the proper way to eat fries. “We start very young. Steak frites is the plate you try at the restaurant with your parents when you are 3 or 4 years old. You need to have nice tenue [manners], and always with a knife and fork in your hands.” Bread however, is meant to be ripped and dipped.

Rule No. 2: Eat the fat

We can blame American diet culture for this French faux pas. Cutting off the fat is an insult to the chef, since, in France, any fat left on the steak was an intentional choice to add richness to the meat. “You need to eat the fat,” Giannini emphasizes, “because when it’s melted well, at the right temperature, this is very nice. You don’t eat a large piece, but just one small piece makes the taste of meat amazing.”

Rule No. 3: Never order the sauce on the side

This is not a side salad or plate of pancakes, steak frites is a dish that is intended to be sopped; and to sop, you need sauce. “The most important ingredient is the sauce,” says Giannini. “And the quantity of the sauce. The only time you will see the sauce on the side is at Michelin-starred restaurants, because we don’t dénaturer le plat [spoil the dish], but the true story: On a real piece of meat, you want the sauce on the top and you want a lot of sauce.” Like most French chefs, Giannini serves his steak frites with sauce au poivre, a rich peppercorn sauce, at his restaurant.

Rule No. 4: No condiments allowed

Want to annoy a French chef? Ask for ketchup with your steak frites. Even worse? A saltshaker. “When you have a good piece of meat with a good jus, you don’t need ketchup or mayonnaise,” says Giannini. Even for the fries. “A warm sauce on the plate is always better.” According to Giannini, and many French people agree, the only acceptable condiments for steak frites include bearnaise sauce (painted on the fry or meat with a knife, never dipped into) or fleur de sel (placed on a single bite, one flake at a time).

Rule No 5: Fries go on the plate

Even if the fries are served in a separate dish while the meat is being cut tableside, as is the case for Giannini’s crispy clarified butter fries at L’Avant Garde, it’s your responsibility to make sure they end up where they belong: on the plate, bathing in the sauce. “In France, we don’t put the fries in a bowl or a ramekin; they’re on the plate,” Giannini says. “Not putting the fries with the steak would be a mistake. The fries should be crispy but always touching the sauce.

Rule No. 6: “Saignant” (rare) is great, but the way you prefer your steak cooked is best

Giannini assures us you won’t offend a chef if you order your steak medium, because, to him, it’s more important that the components are all there: the sauce, the meat, the fries, and the juice of the meat. “The French, we like saignant, but this is because it’s like a religion in France,” Giannini laughs, “but at some point, if you like medium, it’s good for us, it just depends on the taste of the guests. It doesn’t change the dish.”

Rule No. 7: Eat all the fries, leave some sauce

While not a strict rule, it’d be rare to find a leftover pile of fries on a French person’s plate. This is because fries in France are not eaten with every meal, or even every day, so when they are served with a steak frites, it’s because they are part of the meal itself … not a side dish. “If you have fries left and no more jus, there is a problem there,” Giannini smirks. “You need to have a lot of sauce and jus left on the plate so you can sauce with the pain, the bread. This is very French.”

Rule No. 8: Il faut saucer

This French phrase roughly translates to “one must mop up the sauce,” and, when it comes to steak frites, it’s best mopped with bread. “This is a tradition always when you finish your fries and the steak,” Giannini says, noting that it is the equivalent of sending compliments to the chef. “You always have a little bit of the sauce left on the plate, so you tear off a piece of bread, and you saucer. This is finger food, but before that, always a fork.”