I Said Fries! Why Would I Have Ever Said Rice!?

Jess Kapadia•

Boy, I hope you like inane stories! I came home a very special kind of drunk last Saturday night/Sunday morning. It's the kind of drunk where you've found yourself deep into Brooklyn, coming back from a beer writer's birthday party and have an entire late night local train's worth of stops to Upper Manhattan (read: a minimum 45 minutes if the train doesn't keep stopping between stations for no reason) to ponder good and hard what you're getting from the diner to eat in bed before you pass out cold.

Somewhere around Union Square I decided I was very excited about the prospect of corned beef hash and fried eggs. But I wanted regular fries instead of home fries. The drunk little voice in the back of my head told me regular fries would ward off a hangover far better than mere boiled and griddled ones. That's all that drunk little voice in the back of my head ever talks about, food. Fried in particular, with this desperate sense of urgency. It's cray.

Anyway, I marched...no, not even close to marched. I waddled/stumbled to the diner down the street, gasped dramatically when I saw them start to put the chairs on the tables and sweep up (nooooo!), burst in and, with no control over the volume of my voice, asked if they were still serving breakfast. Or serving breakfast yet. It was 3:30 a.m., really kind of a toss-up at that hour. They were! And so I placed my order, subbing in fries for potatoes. Well...someone heard rice, not fries. That's right, I finally got to addressing the headline of this piece, hang on to your hats.

I crawled into bed, popped open the foil takeout container and almost cried on my corned beef hash with two awesome over-easies perched right on top. Why the hell was there a pile of rice next to all that good stuff? What on God's green earth happened? Was I going to be okay in the morning without fries in my stomach to protect me from the evils of processing all that booze? Of course I was; there was a small mountain of pure animal protein and fat in front of me (in bed, which I've proven to myself just...so many times is an unwise place to eat runny eggs).

Wow, you're still here. Thanks. So I indiscriminately hoovered the entire thing, rice and all, then proceeded to raid the freez...uh, fell right asleep and was more or less okay in the morning. But I still craved fries. I've been craving them since, and I was foiled again the other day trying to quell the craving by stopping at my local Gray's Papaya...which only took cash, which I had none of. The fry god has a wack sense of humor, I must say.

So in honor of my still-lingering craving, I bring you every time I've mentioned fries for lunch.

In conclusion, fries. Thank you.

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