The ethos at schmuck. is to expect the unexpected. In few ways does the bar, situated in New York City’s East Village, resemble the craft cocktail establishment of yore. Upon entry, French rap beats flood your ears. Tattooed and pierced servers dressed in cut-off uniform shirts pass over the paper menu. Most of the drinks’ names themselves sound like a mumble jumble of syllables and foods.
Yet, at a spot that’s all counterculture and mind-bending cocktails, there’s one menu item tethering the bar to culinary tradition: steak frites. What began as a melding of Belgian and French cuisines is now a staple around the world. Steak frites is so ubiquitous as to be, in some cases, overwrought.
But schmuck. co-owners Moe Aljaff and Juliette Larrouy fit the classic dish into the bar’s mold — if it has a mold at all — by keeping prices relatively low. “We wanted to make sure that it sits there with all our other dishes in price,” Aljaff says. “Our cocktails are $19 as of right now, and most of our dishes are between $12 and, the most expensive, $24, which is the steak frites.”
Aljaff and Larrouy envisioned the steak frites to complement the bar’s namesake Martini, and the two have formed something of a sub-$50 dinner combo. Unlike the bar’s cocktail program, this take on steak frites isn’t about breaking any rules. It comes as a sliced slab of unctuous and tender hanger steak, frites whose craggly exteriors welcome a pillowy interior, and a gravy boat full of rich, herby béarnaise.
Steak frites landed on schmuck.’s food menu this February, and beyond the pricing and pairing, adding the dish was about representing the owners’ identities.
“For Juliette, having a good steak frites is such a big part of her background,” Aljaff says of his partner, who grew up in Nice along France’s Côte d’Azur. “She came up in kitchens. She worked in very nice restaurants in her early 20s in Paris as well, so we said, ‘All right, let’s take a crack at it.’”
The steak frites is also their way of bringing patrons’ minds back to the streets of NYC, Aljaff says, especially when paired with the Martini, arguably the most New York cocktail of all. “When you open a bar, you want to be a part of the neighborhood and add something new to it,” he says.
Perfecting the steak frites in a space where so much room is dedicated to the robust drinks program — make that programs, as the bar’s two rooms offer different cocktail menus — proved difficult. One obstacle was deciding between sauce au poivre and béarnaise, perhaps the greatest divide in steak frites philosophy. Aljaff, who asks for extra béarnaise whenever he orders the dish, opted for a version of the latter. “There are a million places in New York that do a béarnaise, so we decided to do something that sits between that and an herb butter,” he says. The sauce there is jacked up with herbs, walnuts, shallots, garlic, cream, and anchovies.
The team also had to troubleshoot the lack of freezer space to accommodate the fries, which are boiled, salted, coated in baking soda, frozen, and twice-fried. A few weeks after schmuck. started offering the dish, the bar announced the new menu item on its Instagram, and orders ticked up so much that the kitchen, which did not previously serve fries at all, had to dedicate even more space to the potato spears.
A few months in, Aljaff claims the team has nailed the production of the dish. He says he and Larrouy feel gratified now that the steak frites have caught on with both schmuck.’s devotees and first-timers. Their efforts are justified, he says, each time a customer punctuates a bite with a sip of the schmuck. Martini. “It’s exactly what we were going for,” he says. “Every time I see it going out with a Martini, I get a little bit like, ‘F*ck, yeah.’”
