BY TINA BENITEZ | It still feels weird for Omer Shorshi. For 18 years, he and business partner Suzanne Levinson ran a petite East Village eatery specializing in Belgian-style fries paired with dozens of original sauces. Then, suddenly, it was all gone. Located at 123 Second Ave., Pommes Frites was destroyed following the March 26 explosion at 121 Second Ave. and the subsequent fire and building collapses of Nos. 119, 121 and 123.
No Pommes Frites employees were injured in the blast. Like everyone who witnessed or had some connection to the explosion, the owners were in shock.
Whether you were looking for an afternoon or post-bar snack or some serious starch to stanch your hangover, Pommes Frites was there since March 1997. It wasn’t unusual to see a line of people out the door of the fry shop, all waiting for a paper cone full of frites with a choice of sweet mango chutney, peanut satay, Vietnamese pineapple or any of the rest of the 28 specialty sauces at the pumps.
Levinson modeled the place after frites shops that she would frequent while working in the travel industry, as she bounced back and forth between the Netherlands and Belgium. She took the European idea of a dozen, mostly mayonnaise-based sauces, and nearly tripled it, along with the help of Shorshi, a former Israeli army paramedic and Institute of Culinary Education graduate.
Fried twice — Belgian style — the frites, along with the shop, were an East Village staple for 18 years. After the catastrophe, Shorshi and Levinson did not want to wait a year or longer to reopen; it had to be sooner, they felt. Both started looking at new spaces within a week of the Second Ave. explosion.
Originally, the plan was to keep Pommes Frites in the East Village, but finding the right space at a good price proved difficult. In the end, they found a new location in Greenwich Village. This fall, Pommes Frites will reopen south of Washington Square Park at 128 MacDougal St.
Larger than its previous small Second Ave. location, which housed a 460-square-foot restaurant with an additional 300-square-foot basement, the new location’s retail space is nearly twice as large at 800 square feet with no lower level.
Shorshi said that because there’s no basement, they will have to move everything upstairs to one level, which will be challenging. But the additional space gives them room to improve the restaurant’s kitchen, which previously used a smaller electrical convection oven at the old location.
“Hopefully, we can do things better all the way around,” Shorshi said.
Seating space will be expanded, and alcohol might be served; the owners have applied for a beer and wine license. More sauces will also be added to the menu.
“We’re always looking to add more sauces,” laughed Shorshi.
Their rent on MacDougal is higher at $9,000 than their previous $5,000, but Shorshi believes the new location will pay for itself.
“The rent is much higher than what we paid, but it’s a good location on the street for our product,” he said. “People going out in the East Village always came to our place at the end of the night, so hopefully they’ll still come.”
Days after the disastrous March 26 collapse, fans of Pommes Frites began offering donations to help resurrect the fry shop. But Shorshi refused the funding, which he felt should go to the victims. They later accepted mobile donations via Square, but are working on launching an official Indiegogo campaign later in June to help with the cost of building out the new space.
Shorshi also plans to hire back Pommes Frites employees this fall — some of whom have worked at the restaurant for as long as eight years.
“It means a lot for us,” Shorshi said. “It’s a shock that we are not open, because we have been open for 18 years, all year-round, seven days a week. It’s still weird, but we have to do this.”
