A new cart offers potatoes topped with pretty much anything you can imagine.
Photo: Courtesy of The Potato Bros NYC
There is perhaps no food more humble than a baked potato. But driven by creators like the U.K.’s SpudBros — 4.9 million followers and counting — POV footage of scored, fluffed, and amply topped spuds are all over TikTok. Baked potatoes are just as convenient as Sweetgreen or Chipotle, and should be as prevalent, but only recently has New York caught up to the glories of the quick-potato lunch.
Spudz Slope, which was opened by the Syko team in Windsor Terrace last year, offers a choice of sweet potato or classic for piling with shawarma, birria, bulgogi, or chopped cheese. There is also the Spud Potato kiosk in Bryant Park’s Winter Village, but a potato with butter, beans, and cheese costs $20 there, which makes it hard to recommend — potatoes should be hot, filling, and affordable.
Lucky, then, that a new cart at Cooper Square called the Potato Bros NYC specializes in kumpir, Turkey’s take on a loaded baked potato. A base model with salt, pepper, butter, and cheese starts at a very reasonable $7.90. From there, customization is the point: Toppings are tsatsiki, jalapeños, eggs or sausage cooked to order, mushrooms, chicken, and pretty much anything else you could think to put on top of a potato.
While sitting on a bench by the Astor Place cube the other day, I flipped open a weighty box to reveal tsatsiki and a side salad’s worth of vegetables completely obscuring my sliced sausage and the potato underneath. When I finally got to the potato layer, where the cheese had already been melted into the fluffy starch, I was surprised by an amply applied homemade hot sauce. Each mouthful was a different bite, along with the crisp skin that I tore from the side and dunked into the toppings like it was nature’s bread bowl.
Owners Yigit Inan and Ata Kilickaya — who are bros, not brothers — say that on a good day, they can run through 100 Idaho russets. “This is exactly what we want, but it took a couple of months to find these potatoes, because we tried at least ten,” says Inan of their tater-testing process. But the recent cold weather has slowed business some. “Right now, 50 potatoes, 45 potatoes in a day is okay for us,” says Inan. The customers who keep lining up? Students, especially from NYU and Cooper Union, all of whom the owners give a discount, since they were students fairly recently themselves — Inan and Kilickaya first got the idea for the cart a few years ago while they were at university in Turkey.
On a recent chilly afternoon, one gangly guy wearing a backpack waited to try out the cart for the first time. At last, it was his turn and he took full advantage of the Bros’ build-whatever-you-want business model: “Can I get a baked potato with cheese, Bolognese, and guacamole?” he asked. Moments later, his order was ready to go.
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