Brion: When did so many restaurants start charging extra for fries?

Burgers and fries are a classic duo. They’re inseparable. A perfectly American pairing, like Simon and Garfunkel, peanut butter and jelly or Bert and Ernie. It’s hard to imagine one without the other.

Yet lately I’ve been spotting more and more Twin Cities restaurants serving burgers without fries as the default. Instead, fries have become an optional add-on.

I’ll be the first to admit that social media polls are an imperfect science, but when I asked on Instagram if a burger should come with fries, a whopping 86% said yes. That included my friend Chadner, who declared, “No fries in this economy?!!?!”

The vocal 14% minority, however, had their reasons, from believing the quality of fries drops when they’re included for free, to simply not liking fries, which I struggle to comprehend. As a native Belgian, fries are basically our national dish. And like in Belgium, in my opinion, fries should always, always come with a comically large amount of mayonnaise (at no charge).

The trend toward a la carte fries has a handful of causes: rising food and labor costs, price optics, menu unbundling, and the fact that chefs have been investing in making excellent fries and want to charge accordingly. So I asked a bunch of local burger pros to weigh in: Should a burger come with fries?

Chef Mike DeCamp, operations director and co-owner at Jester Concepts, oversees a variety of restaurant brands across the Twin Cities, including several locations of Parlour. The Parlour Burger ($18.99) is often credited as having kicked off the region’s smashburger craze, but getting fries with it will cost an extra $8.50 (it’s a generous portion, arguably enough for two). DeCamp says Parlour was one of the first spots around to serve burgers solo.

He’s firmly team “burger without fries,” saying, “I personally like restaurants where I get to pick what I want. There’s a time and a place for a composed plate of food. But I’m a habitual sampler, and my wife and I will just order so much stuff.”

At Mik German’s 328 Grill inside the American Legion Post 98 in St. Paul Park, burgers start at $14 and come with either tots or battered fries. For his diners, he says, it “would be weird” not to have a side included.

But when pressed to answer if burgers should always come with fries, German said he could go either way. Sometimes he wants a full meal with sides, but sometimes he wants to try more of the menu, like when he goes to Angry Line Cook food truck and gets two or three burgers (and no fries).

To German, most of the fries out there are serviceable and just “do the job.” But he’s happy to pay extra for quality fries, citing Le Burger 4304. “They’re phenomenal,” German says, “because they take the time to do it 100 percent the right way.”

So I called up Jonathan Gans, the chef and co-owner of Le Burger, the year-old fast-casual eatery in Linden Hills, to find out what makes the fries there so good. Gans told me all about his three-step process, which involves blanching the fries in a seasoned broth (aka court bouillon), oil blanching them at a low temp, freezing them, and then frying them to order.

The goal? “A perfect texture on the outside of crispiness,” says Gans, “with a fluffy, creamy center.” They go through 2,000 pounds of potatoes a week. “Literally all day, every day, we have one to two people just cutting and blanching and making fries,” he says. “It’s a huge percentage of our labor.”

Over at Gus Gus in St. Paul, the fries are also a labor-intensive project. They’re brined for 24 hours — with vinegar, Tabasco, onion powder, garlic powder, salt and pepper — and then double fried. They’re available a la carte, and they come with both ketchup and a lemony, garlicky, anchovy-infused bagna cauda aioli. While not a classic, traditional mayonnaise, it packs a subtle umami punch that even this Belgian can get behind. Co-owner Anna Morgan tells me that people often come in just for a big bowl of fries alongside a glass of wine at the bar, especially during happy hour.

At Gus Gus, fries have always come with the cheeseburger ($19), though. “Honestly, we never really thought twice about it,” Morgan says. “Kevin, my husband and the chef, we both think a burger and fries is like a package deal. … I never just want a burger. I want fries with my burger. That’s part of the experience.”

The truth is that burgers and fries have always been inextricably linked. It’s a universal bond. So even if they’re separated and served a la carte, I want to believe that somehow they’ll still find each other. Now if they only came with mountains of mayonnaise, too.