Episode 13
35 minutes
Belgium is famous for its frites, and Antwerp has a strong claim to being where the story began. In this episode of The European Compass, I go back to Belgium, where I first learned to love frites with tartar sauce as a student in 1992, to find out where to eat them in Antwerp today.
I start with the history. Why are they called French fries when the rest of the world doesn’t call them that? I also look at Jean-Frédéric Krieger, known as Monsieur Fritz, who sold fried potatoes at the Antwerp fair in 1845, and at Fritkot Max, which traces its history back to 1842 on the banks of the Scheldt.
Then I compare two very different places. Frites Atelier was opened by Sergio Herman, the Dutch chef who won three Michelin stars at Oud Sluis before opening The Jane in Antwerp. He spent 18 months finding the right potato, and the result has become an Instagram favourite. I went to see whether it lives up to the attention, and then tried Fritkot Max, the traditional frites shop on Groenplaats, to see how the two compare on price, sauce, setting and the frites themselves.
To finish, I explain why I think Antwerp is one of the most underrated cities in Europe, and how easy it is to reach by train from Paris.
Episode 13: The Best Frites in Antwerp, Transcript
Introduction
Welcome to The European Compass, the podcast where we explore the heart of Europe through its food, its markets and the stories behind every dish. I’m your host, Julia Doust, and if you’ve ever planned a trip around a meal, then you’re in the right place. Let’s dig in.
Planning food around a trip to Antwerp
Today we are talking about Antwerp. I went to Antwerp last week, Antwerp in Belgium, obviously. Quite often when I travel for The European Compass, I’m looking at nice restaurants, mostly Michelin star but not always, but some nice, good quality restaurants. I was going to do that when I went to Antwerp. I looked it up, and there’s loads of really good restaurants in Antwerp. Actually, there’s even one with three Michelin stars, I think. There’s loads of really, really nice restaurants.
Interestingly, if you are ever travelling on a Monday and a Tuesday, you need to watch out for your restaurants, because if you’re looking for really good food, you may find, and this was the case in Belgium, that many of their good restaurants aren’t open on Mondays and Tuesdays. They open at the weekends, and then they close Mondays and Tuesdays instead.
Anyway, when I went to Antwerp, I was going to eat, as I say, at the good restaurants, and I thought, what do I actually want to eat if I go to Belgium?
Student days in Belgium and a first taste of tartar sauce
Now, I spent quite a bit of time in Belgium. I did a six month work placement in Belgium from university. As a student, I’d never really lived abroad, and had only been abroad a couple of times before. I took my little car, I had a very, very old Renault 5 at the time, and I drove it on my own, took the ferry and drove up to Belgium, and spent six months doing research into removing sulphur from energy stacks, if you’re interested.
Anyway, I was in Belgium for six months as a student, and what I ate the most was frites, so French fries, and of course they don’t call them French fries in Belgium. This was pretty much my staple diet as a student. We got fed in the halls of residence once a day, I think we got a meal, and then for the other meals we’d go out, particularly at weekends. I think the restaurant wasn’t even open at weekends. We’d go out, and there was a little corner hole in the wall that sold frites in cones.
I was used to chips from a chip shop in England, wrapped in newspaper, big, fat, sort of greasy things. Then I turned up in Belgium, and we’re going back quite a while, we are talking about 1992, I think, and in Belgium you got these frites, these chips, in a cone. It’s always in a cone, a big cone, not a little cone, and then they put sauce on top. The sauce of preference in Belgium is mayonnaise, and this isn’t just a tiny bit of mayonnaise. It’s not like one of those silly sachets you get from McDonald’s which covers about three chips. This is a huge quantity of mayonnaise that they put on top of the chips, on top of the cone.
I remember as a student, the trick was to try and eat the chips such that you still had some mayonnaise left for the ones stuck in the bottom of the cone. So you’re kind of trying to eat around, so the mayonnaise slowly drops down and you’ve got some mayonnaise left for the bottom chips.
I’m going to call them chips, because that’s what I call them. Chips, fries, frites, they’re interchangeable. Now I’m in France I call them frites, but I did call them chips, so I mix the words. Excuse me on that one.
Anyway, this is what we did. We’d go and get a cone with mayonnaise, and one day, and I can’t remember why, instead of getting mayonnaise, I got tartar sauce. I don’t know if it’s because they had no mayonnaise left, or if it was because someone with me said, “No, you have to try this.”
Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever had tartar sauce on fries. Let me tell you, it’s the best thing ever, honestly. There’s no going back to mayonnaise once you’ve had tartar sauce on your fries. I was an absolute convert, a total convert. I’m not even sure I’d had tartar sauce before, because I grew up in England, we didn’t have a lot of money, and we didn’t eat a very varied diet growing up. It was an absolute revelation.
Back to Antwerp in 2026
So anyway, back to 2026. I’m going to Antwerp for a few days, and I thought what I really, really want is some proper Belgian chips. That was it. Out of the window went the nice restaurants. I did actually find a nice restaurant, and I did eat in a nice restaurant when I was in Antwerp, but what was really driving me there was the chips.
So I did a bit of research to have a look at where you should eat fries in Antwerp. Everybody associates Belgium as a whole with chips, with frites. Well, they should. They shouldn’t be called French fries, they should be called Belgian fries. But is Antwerp in particular known for its fries? So I looked into it, as you do.
Why are they called French fries?
Firstly, why are they called French fries? It turns out there are a couple of different hypotheses as to why they are called French fries.
The first is linguistic. To French something, in terms of a vegetable, means to cut it into a thin, long strip. So to French a potato would be to slice it into something that looks remarkably like a French fry. That’s one reason, but that doesn’t really sound that obvious to me.
The other reasoning that I’ve heard, which does sound more likely, especially given where they are called French fries, is that American soldiers in the First World War were in Belgium, fighting on Belgian soil, and they were fighting alongside Belgian soldiers. But the Belgian soldiers were speaking French, because they were from the southern part of Belgium, from Wallonia, where they speak French. These Belgian soldiers were cooking fries, and the Americans thought that they were French, and therefore referred to them as French fries. So when they went back to America and started cooking them, they referred to them as French fries.
This actually does seem quite likely to me, because the rest of the world doesn’t call them French fries. In France they’re just called frites, and the same in Belgium, they’re not referred to by a country. So that makes a lot of sense to me, and brings it back to Belgium.
Monsieur Fritz, Fritkot Max and the Antwerp connection
So why Belgium, and is Antwerp linked into this?
The earliest reference that I can find of people selling fries is a man called Jean-Frédéric Krieger, who people used to call Monsieur Fritz. He had an itinerant stand, a food truck if you like, that’s what we would call it these days, a stand that went to different towns and different fairs, certainly in Belgium, and I think he covered a bit of France as well. He started selling potatoes fried in oil, and that is the first reference, going back to 1845. Monsieur Fritz was selling fried potatoes, and he went to the fair in Antwerp. So the first reference of fries being in Antwerp was Jean-Frédéric Krieger selling his fries at a fair.
In a similar time frame, there was also a man called Max, who had opened a shop selling frites, Belgian fries, on the banks of the river Scheldt. The Scheldt is a big river that goes from northern France up through Antwerp, and it’s linked to the Rhine. Antwerp and Rotterdam are linked through a canal system that connects the Scheldt to the Rhine. The Scheldt is actually a surprisingly big river. I was quite surprised when I got to Antwerp to see how big it was.
Anyway, Max had a shop that dates back to 1842, so actually slightly earlier than Monsieur Fritz was selling his fried potatoes, and that was on the riverbank. Now, the river was altered in order to straighten it and make it easier for navigation, and so he had to move his shop. So whilst he claims to have the oldest chip shop, the oldest seller of fries in Antwerp, the shop itself had to move because of the work on the river. But that shop is still there. This isn’t an itinerant stand and this isn’t a food truck, this is actually a shop. So I think Max should get a little bit more credit than Monsieur Fritz, because he’s still there, and he was actually there slightly earlier than Jean-Frédéric Krieger.
So that is where Antwerp links in with Belgian fries, which I think is a very good start. We’re onto a good thing here, especially as Max is still open.
Frites Atelier and chef Sergio Herman
Obviously I had to go and try out Max, but I thought, what else is there? Is there something more modern? Is there something better than Max?
I came across something called Frites Atelier, and if you’ve travelled in Europe recently, you may have heard of them, because they’re popping up all over the place now. There’s even one in Soho in London now, I think. There’s certainly one in Amsterdam, and I think there’s one in Paris as well. Frites Atelier are all over Instagram. I’ve seen influencers who are travelling going to Frites Atelier, so I thought, is this just an Instagram viral thing, or are they actually making good fries?
Frites Atelier was opened by a man who used to have three Michelin stars. This is chef Sergio Herman, who had a restaurant that I think was originally his parents’, but then he took it over and changed it, and it ended up getting a lot of credit. It was in the Netherlands, not Belgium. He’s Dutch. He went to catering school in Bruges, in Belgium, then went back to the Netherlands to take over this restaurant, and turned it into something amazing that eventually got three Michelin stars, which is no small feat. This is someone who seriously knows about cooking.
He didn’t just get three Michelin stars. Gault&Millau, the other reference for restaurants in Europe, gave his restaurant 20 out of 20. They score things out of 20, and he was the first restaurant in the Benelux region to get 20 out of 20.
Anyway, he decided that he had had enough of the Michelin-starred world, for one reason or another. I didn’t go into too much detail about why. He closed the restaurant back in 2013, came to Antwerp and opened another restaurant called The Jane, and that got a Michelin star, and then a second Michelin star. So this man has a bit of a Midas touch. He’s no longer running The Jane. The Jane went off with the co-chef, who is now running it.
And Sergio decided to open a chip shop instead. So from selling two and three Michelin-starred food, the absolute food of the gods, he decided what we really need is chips. And he went about it in a totally different way. Rather than thinking of this as just street food, quick and easy and basic, he decided to do it properly.
He spent 18 months researching the best potato to make the best chips, and he found a potato that grows in Zeeland, in the Netherlands, called the Agria potato. It’s high in starch, which allows you to get the crispy outside and the really fluffy interior. He went into other details as well, what kind of fat to use, what type of salt to use on the chips, and what sort of sauces should go on them.
It’s still a chip shop, it’s not a restaurant as such. You go up to a counter, you order your chips, you get your chips, and there is seating there. But it’s all been done in a way that this isn’t plastic tables and no decor. This has got a marble counter, chalkboards on the walls, decor and nice music, and there were even candles on the tables. This is the sort of chip shop you could take a date to. It’s really nice, and I think this is why the influencers go there. They’re going because it makes a pretty picture.
Eating at Frites Atelier
Quite often you’ll see images of queues for this place. People queue up and wait a long time. Now, if you know me at all, you know I don’t queue. I don’t do queuing. If it’s more than a five minute wait, I’ll just go elsewhere, because even if the food’s amazing, there’s other amazing food around. It’s just not worth it. If I can reserve, great, but if I can’t reserve, I’m not standing in a queue for an hour.
But I went to Frites Atelier at 5:00 in the afternoon, because I’d been travelling and I didn’t have any lunch, so by 5:00 in the afternoon I was hungry. That’s not a normal eating time in Belgium. Normally you’d have your lunch at midday and then your evening meal a bit later than 5:00, more like 7:00 in the evening. So there was certainly no queue. There were a few other people eating there, but there was no queue. Straight in, not a problem.
It’s a lovely place, with a really nice frontage. It’s on a pedestrian street with some quite nice shops around it. It’s got a very dark wood frontage with gold lettering, and it all looks very high scale. When you go in, it looks high scale as well. There’s marble and it’s lovely.
The menu is pretty basic, in that they’ve kept it to what frites shops normally sell, so that’s frites with sauces, and then they’ve got a few other foods, burgers and things, to make sure that people don’t go hungry. But that’s not what people are going for.
The classic is your frites, and then you can have two sauces. I’m not quite sure why they do it, but you can’t order frites and one sauce, it’s frites and two sauces, which I thought was a little strange, because I only wanted one sauce. I’d decided I was going to test this out properly, so I needed to do my trick from my student days of eating frites with tartar sauce.
On the menu at Frites Atelier, the standard frites are €4.95, and then you pay another €2.50 for your two sauces. That ends up being quite expensive for the sauce, because it’s a little pot. It wasn’t the great big loading up of sauce that I was used to from my student days. It was just a little paper cup filled with sauce. It’s quite a lot of sauce, but it was not the gallons I was used to.
Their other specialities include the one that seems to be popular on Instagram, Parmesan and basil, which is basically their version of cheesy chips: grated Parmesan and then a basil flavoured mayonnaise. This seemed to be what most people were ordering. They also do quite an interesting sounding Indo peanut flavour, which is Indonesian. Indonesia has quite a lot of links to the Netherlands, so you get quite a lot of Indonesian restaurants in the Netherlands. This is an Indonesian influenced dish with peanuts, gherkins, fried onions and some chilli oil. That does sound very good, actually.
And then they have a Flemish beef stew, which is more classic. Beef stew is quite classic in frites shops. Often they’ll stew the beef and then take the beef out and just serve the gravy, so you’re basically getting chips and gravy.
So this is what I had, and I was very happy. I ordered my frites. It’s one of those places where you order and then get one of those discs that buzz when your meal’s ready. You pay at one side, you get a disc, you go and sit down, and when it buzzes you go back and pick up your order. As it happened, it was about a minute. I sat down and stood straight back up again, because there was no one there.
Double frying and beef fat
They do the second fry fresh. Belgian chips are fried twice. First they’re fried at a lower temperature, and they’re fried in beef fat. I think Frites Atelier did have a vegetarian version, I would have to check, but I wasn’t looking for it. The reason why Belgian fries taste so good is because they’re cooked in beef fat, and it makes a massive difference to the flavour. This is the main thing that makes Belgian chips taste better than other chips. You also find it in places in northern France. Places like Lille also have their frites cooked in beef fat. Where I live, unfortunately, they don’t, which is a real shame.
So the chips are cooked once, and then the second fry happens once the chips have been ordered. That’s in very hot fat, a very quick flash fry, and that’s where you get your crunch. Frites Atelier are doing that to order. All their chips have had their first fry, and the second fry goes into the very hot fat to order, so when you get your frites, they are absolutely fresh.
And to their credit, I have to admit this is not just an internet sensation. This is not just a viral “oh, it looks pretty, let’s go and take some photographs”. These are genuinely the best chips I’ve ever tasted. They are amazing. I went thinking, I’d skipped lunch, I was a bit peckish, but I wasn’t going to eat this great big pack of fries. I ate all the fries, believe me. I ate them all. It was lovely, really, really nice.
You get a crunch, and they’re cut to a nice size. They’re not the very fine French fry, and they’re not as fat as you might get in a chip shop in England. They’re somewhere in between, and they’re just cooked to utter perfection.
It used to be a cone with a plastic fork. These were in a cardboard tray with a little wooden fork. Now, I don’t like wood in my mouth. I’ve got this thing about wooden spoons and wooden forks, so I just used my fingers. I’m afraid I’m a heathen. Frites are finger food as far as I’m concerned.
So I had my frites and my little pot of tartar sauce. They served the sauce to me in a pot. At Frites Atelier, one of the things that people are showing and talking about is that down one side they’ve got big ceramic jars with little taps on them, and you can go and get your own sauce. They only seem to do that for a few of the sauces. They certainly did it for the basil sauce, and I noticed that two of the ceramic jars had basil on them. So I’m guessing the tartar sauce is not very popular, and therefore they don’t bother putting it in these, and they’ve doubled up with the basil because that’s the one people are ordering. If you’ve got one of the sauces with a tap, you can go back up and get more, which makes more sense of the amount. I probably could have gone back up to the counter, but I didn’t need to. I had enough.
Basically, if you’re in Antwerp, or anywhere else, go. I’m assuming they’re all the same quality. This is an assumption. The one in Antwerp is the original, the first one that opened, and I’m assuming that the other Frites Ateliers are the same quality. It looks like they’re starting to franchise it, which concerns me, because I think they might then lose some of the quality. It tends to happen once something gets franchised out. You lose some of the control and you might lose some of the quality. But in the meantime, if you’re in Antwerp, Frites Atelier is worth it, as long as you don’t have to queue. Go there, it’s lovely.
Do you know, they even have beer on their menu. That didn’t surprise me, it’s Belgium, of course they’ve got beer. But they’ve also got wine. They’ve got a little wine list, including champagne, and you can buy champagne by the glass. So when I said you could go here on a date, you really could. You’ve got candles on the table, and you can get champagne by the glass to have with your fries. Brilliant, absolutely amazing.
Eating at Fritkot Max
So I thought I’d better check out whether Max could live up to this quality. He’s been here an awful long time, so is it the same quality?
The next day I went to Max at lunchtime. I think it was just before 1:00, and the other restaurants around were busy. There are quite a few tourists. It’s on one of the big squares, and there are quite a few tourist restaurants as you’re walking up to it, and all their terraces were busy. So I thought, oh God, I’m not going to get into this place.
And actually, when you get there, it’s quite unassuming. It’s opposite McDonald’s and next to a Starbucks, it’s a little place, it looks a bit scruffy, and it’s got the bins outside. There were maybe one or two of the little tables taken, and that was all. They didn’t have seating downstairs inside. I think there might be some seating upstairs. But compared to Frites Atelier, it’s very down at heel. It’s all right to grab a quick bite, but you wouldn’t want to take your date here.
The fries themselves are a similar price. At Frites Atelier I paid €4.95. At Fritkot Max they were €4.30 for a small, €4.70 for a medium and €5.10 for a large. I got the small, and I think it was about the same size as I’d had at Frites Atelier. It’s difficult to compare, because Fritkot Max were doing them in a cone, so it’s a different shaped container. But at Fritkot Max I didn’t get charged for the sauce. The sauce was included in the price.
They did have the tartar sauce on tap. They had their sauces on one side as well, gave me a little pot, and their tartar sauce was on tap, so I could help myself. They had all the normal sauces, mayonnaise, ketchup and andalouse. People don’t use ketchup on their fries. It’s offered for the tourists, but Belgians do not eat ketchup on their fries. Andalouse sauce is quite a spicy sort of tomato and mayonnaise mix. They had the usual selection of sauces, and again, you could get burgers and so on as well.
Then I asked for a drink. I didn’t mention that at Frites Atelier they have a selection of drinks, including the wine list, and they also had homemade iced tea, which is what I had, a very nice pineapple and basil iced tea. The only disappointment there was that it came in a plastic cup. Given that I was eating in, and everything else was being served properly, it seemed a bit off. It was a sort of takeaway cup, but never mind.
So at Fritkot Max I said, “Oh, can I have a drink?” And he just pointed to the vending machine next to him and said, “You have to get your own out of the vending machine.” I can’t even remember if it took card. I think it must have. A standard vending machine, and your drinks pop out. So a totally different experience to Frites Atelier.
Anyway, I got my frites and sat down. Very good frites. If I hadn’t eaten at Frites Atelier, I would be raving about them and saying, my God, these are really good chips. So I don’t think you’re missing out if you end up going somewhere different. They were very, very good chips, maybe not quite as perfect as Frites Atelier, but their tartar sauce was better. I don’t know why, but it just was. Given the rest of the place, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was an industrial one and the other one was homemade, but it was a better tartar sauce.
So I would happily go back to Fritkot Max if I was just passing and wanted a quick bite, but it isn’t the same experience.
It’s probably a more authentic experience. When you’re travelling, people talk about authenticity, and eating in the cheaper, slightly down at heel places that serve frites is more authentic, because that’s what frites were, street food. So yes, if you’re looking for the authentic experience, then the one with the bins next to you, not in a particularly nice spot, is probably the more authentic experience. But that doesn’t necessarily make it better.
Frites Atelier have taken a traditional street food that’s loved by everyone, and they have improved it and made it better. Now, I’m not advertising. This is not publicity. When I went to Antwerp and saw this place, I fully intended to come back on here and talk about how the internet was hyping up places and that you don’t need to go there. I fully expected to do that, and instead what I’m saying is no, actually, this is worth it. You should go to Frites Atelier. You will get the best chips you will ever have in your life.
Why Antwerp deserves more attention
I would almost go as far as to say it’s worth travelling to Belgium just for the frites, but that would underplay Belgium, and it would underplay Antwerp. Antwerp is a lovely city. I have no idea why it isn’t on the standard travel radar. I have no idea why everybody goes to Bruges instead. Bruges at some point did some amazing marketing, and Antwerp didn’t bother.
Antwerp is a lovely city. It always has been. Ever since I was a student, and I wasn’t based in Antwerp but I went to Antwerp, I always thought it was the best city in Belgium, and this trip back has confirmed that for me. It’s got a beautiful Old Town. It’s got some fantastic art museums. It’s got some great restaurants. The people are lovely, and the whole environment, a lot of it is pedestrianised, there are trams everywhere, people are cycling. Everything about the city is amazing.
I came back and said to my husband, “Look, if we ever do have to move out of France, we go to Antwerp.” Unfortunately, I don’t speak Dutch, but John, my husband, does a little bit, because at the same time I was in Belgium, he was in the Netherlands. So at a push we could get by. I’m not planning on moving out of France, by the way, but that’s how much I love Antwerp. Fantastic place.
Getting there and where to stay
It’s easy to get there. It’s on the train line between Paris and Amsterdam. Eurostar run the trains, and you can get there direct from Paris. I got the train direct back to Paris. On the way there I changed in Brussels, because it was a lot cheaper. It’s just about an hour from Brussels, so it’s really, really easy to get to.
There are some great hotels, and I’ve got a hotel review coming soon. If you are in Antwerp, the Hotel Franq, have a look out on my YouTube, because there will be a review of the Hotel Franq. But there are other great hotels there too. It’s just a lovely, lovely city.
Do yourself a favour. You can always go to Bruges for a day trip if you want, but there’s way more to do in Antwerp than there is in Bruges. I think it’s an amazing city. Antwerp is almost the archetypal European city. When you’ve got in your head what a European city is, it’s got a cathedral, it’s got an Old Town and maybe some guild houses, it’s got a river running through, it’s got some cobblestones, someone on a bike cycling past. This is Antwerp, seriously. Get yourself to Antwerp, go and eat at Frites Atelier, and have the best frites of your life.
I’m going to stop there, because this cold is really starting to make this a little bit difficult.
Thanks for joining me on The European Compass podcast. If you enjoyed today’s episode, share it with a fellow food traveller, and don’t forget to subscribe for more delicious adventures. Until next time, bon appétit and happy travels.
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