The Dave's Hot Chicken Side Dish That Gives Us Mixed Emotions

The eponymous Dave of Dave's Hot Chicken trained under Chef Thomas Keller...so maybe our expectations were too high going in? We need to talk about the cheese fries. In Tasting Table's roundup of the Dave's Hot Chicken menu items to order and the ones to skip completely, we wrote the chain's cheese fries off as a skip. However, in our ranking of the 10 best restaurant cheese fries, we gave Dave's cheese fries the illustrious number two spot out of 10 (surpassed only by Wingstop). Why do the results of our taste-tests vary so drastically? After some soul (and stomach, and internet) searching, the answer seems to be that Dave's cheese fries vary pretty drastically, too.

As we mentioned in our "skip" piece, while the cheese sauce "scored in the flavor department," delivering "just the right amount of salty and tangy with a moderately sharp bite," it was a textural turnoff, arriving thin and watery. A total letdown. However, in the same piece, we praise Dave's regular fries (sans cheese sauce) for their crinkle-cut texture: "They have a slight crunch on the outside and a soft, melt-in-your-mouth interior — two qualities of an excellent french fry." We also raved about the fry seasoning, which is "a little herby, a little spicy, and a lot delicious," setting Dave's crinkle-cut beauties apart from other popular fast food fries. Elsewhere online, a Yelp customer review of Dave's cheese fries agrees, "We liked the fries better without the cheese, however, if you like cheesy fries, by all means get them." How can a fry that brings such joy be such a bummer in the cheese department?

At a Dave's Hot Chicken location in Chicago, a side of cheese fries costs $4.99. In a Reddit thread, one foodie reports on their experience, saying they "Tried the hot chicken and cheese fries from the new Dave's Hot Chicken Chicago location," and while they didn't leave a stellar review of the hot chicken, they noted that the "Cheese fries were solid." Nobody's perfect (not even you, Hot Chicken Dave), so we're willing to consider the possibility that we just stumbled upon an "off" batch of cheese sauce for our initial experience. After all, we certainly seemed to get a good batch in our cheese-fry-ranking piece, in which we gave Dave's second place. As we wrote here, the sauce "cloaks each fry in a cheesy film and acts as the perfect complement to all those punchy spices." Again, that same distinctive fry seasoning did some major heavy lifting. 

Another Reddit post dedicated to the chain shares a photo of a Dave's meal, garnering comments such as "Those are the best looking crinkle cut fries I have ever seen!" Still, other commenters share our less-than-stellar experience of Dave's fries — yet also echo our hypothesis that perhaps they visited at a bad time: "mediocre fries, mediocre sauce. Could've just been an off day as this was shortly after the location opened and it was really busy." In short, feel free to roll the dice, but know that you're not guaranteed killer cheese fries from Dave's Hot Chicken. You're either in for a treat or a major disappointment.