A brand new cart affords potatoes topped with just about something you may think about.
Picture: Courtesy of The Potato Bros NYC
There’s maybe no meals extra humble than a baked potato. However pushed by creators just like the U.Ok.’s SpudBros — 4.9 million followers and counting — POV footage of scored, fluffed, and amply topped spuds are throughout TikTok. Baked potatoes are simply as handy as Sweetgreen or Chipotle, and needs to be as prevalent, however solely just lately has New York caught as much as the glories of the quick-potato lunch.
Spudz Slope, which was opened by the Syko crew in Windsor Terrace final yr, affords a alternative of candy potato or basic for piling with shawarma, birria, bulgogi, or chopped cheese. There’s additionally the Spud Potato kiosk in Bryant Park’s Winter Village, however a potato with butter, beans, and cheese prices $20 there, which makes it onerous to advocate — potatoes needs to be scorching, filling, and reasonably priced.
Fortunate, then, {that a} new cart at Cooper Sq. referred to as the Potato Bros NYC makes a speciality of kumpir, Turkey’s tackle a loaded baked potato. A base mannequin with salt, pepper, butter, and cheese begins at a really affordable $7.90. From there, customization is the purpose: Toppings are tsatsiki, jalapeños, eggs or sausage cooked to order, mushrooms, rooster, and just about the rest you might assume to placed on high of a potato.
Whereas sitting on a bench by the Astor Place dice the opposite day, I flipped open a weighty field to disclose tsatsiki and a facet salad’s value of greens fully obscuring my sliced sausage and the potato beneath. After I lastly acquired to the potato layer, the place the cheese had already been melted into the fluffy starch, I used to be shocked by an amply utilized do-it-yourself scorching sauce. Every mouthful was a special chunk, together with the crisp pores and skin that I tore from the facet and dunked into the toppings prefer it was nature’s bread bowl.
House owners Yigit Inan and Ata Kilickaya — who’re bros, not brothers — say that on a very good day, they’ll run by means of 100 Idaho russets. “That is precisely what we would like, but it surely took a few months to seek out these potatoes, as a result of we tried at the very least ten,” says Inan of their tater-testing course of. However the latest chilly climate has slowed enterprise some. “Proper now, 50 potatoes, 45 potatoes in a day is okay for us,” says Inan. The shoppers who preserve lining up? College students, particularly from NYU and Cooper Union, all of whom the house owners give a reduction, since they have been college students pretty just lately themselves — Inan and Kilickaya first acquired the concept for the cart just a few years in the past whereas they have been at college in Turkey.
On a latest chilly afternoon, one gangly man carrying a backpack waited to check out the cart for the primary time. Ultimately, it was his flip and he took full benefit of the Bros’ build-whatever-you-want enterprise mannequin: “Can I get a baked potato with cheese, Bolognese, and guacamole?” he requested. Moments later, his order was able to go.
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If you happen to favor to learn in print, you may as well discover this text within the February 23, 2026, concern of
New York Journal.
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If you happen to favor to learn in print, you may as well discover this text within the February 23, 2026, concern of
New York Journal.
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