Gilroy Garlic Fries at AT&T Park

Some people go to AT&T Park to watch the ballgame.  Ok, fine, most probably do.  But I really don't care about baseball.  I do however care about delicious things.

My first outing to the ballpark thus started with the item that everyone claims is the best thing to eat at the park: the Crazy Crab sandwich.  Then I moved onto a disappointing dessert-like beverage.  Once it was time for more savory food, my research easily pointed me at the next thing to try: the garlic fries.

Scattered throughout the park are numerous Gilroy Garlic Fries stands.  They all had pretty long lines.  From casual observation, it really did seem like more than half the people I saw with food had garlic fries.  And the aroma was pretty hard to resist.  I had to try them!

Garlic Fries.  $7.75.

Like everything else served at the ballpark, they were not fresh, baskets were already prepared and sitting under heat lamps.  Sigh.  The park was crowded, so I know throughput was kinda high, but still.  Grumble.

They were served in a basket, which was then placed into a drink holder container.  An assortment of basic Heinz condiments were available from dispensers in the center of the food stand area: ketchup, mustard, relish, bbq sauce, ranch, and mayo.  No little containers were provided though, so you could basically only just dump into onto your fries, rather than have a vessel to dunk into.  I wanted to try all the sauces, and didn't know how much sauce I'd want, as the garlic fries might be flavorful enough on their own to not really require much, so this made me grumpy.  I tried to squirt different sauces around the perimeter of the cardboard drink holder thing, but as it had holes in it, this didn't work well.  I'm still not sure why they came in that strange holder in the first place, as the basket really wasn't designed to fit in there.  Anyway.

As I expected, the fries were lukewarm and pretty limp and soggy.  They weren't particularly good.  The bites I had with garlic were better, but there was far less garlic than I expected, and it wasn't well distributed.  For sauces, I liked the ranch the best, but all were very mediocre standard Heinz.  The BBQ was notable in how watery and flavorless it was.

They came with 2 mints on the side, a cute touch, presumably to deal with the garlic breath :)

And, like many things at the park, the price.  $7.75 for a basket of fries? Meh.  It was a large basket, but I wish they offered a smaller size, since I wanted my crab sandwich, fries, and some sweet treats too!  Would not get again. One of the other stands also sold garlic fries, not with the "Gilroy Garlic" label, but perhaps they were better?