French fries are pieces of potato deep-fried until golden, served hot with salt. They are restaurant food rather than a shelf-stable snack, and this category covers fast-food fries and their playful variations. Packaged, crunchy potato sticks that keep in the cupboard are grouped separately under fries.
The example is McDonald’s Minion Potatoes, Minion-shaped fried potato pieces from McDonald’s Thailand’s Despicable Me promotion in mid-2020. The review found them soft rather than crisp, with a texture closer to mashed potato than to classic fries.
Plain fries are made from potato, oil and salt, but restaurant fryers can be shared with other foods, so people with allergies may want to ask the restaurant how they are cooked.
