“It glows,” says the woman at Gilly’s Craft Beer & Fine Wine in Rockville, placing my Timmy G’s Ham Cruncher in front of me. And she’s right. The sandwich, about four inches high, sits in a paper basket emitting an eerie fluorescent visual hum: ham and cheddar on white bread, slathered with a nice spicy mustard and stuffed with almost a Grab Bag’s worth of Cheetos. Mercifully, I didn’t request a side, since my order is already a sandwich and a side in one.

“That looks disgusting, dude,” says Sami Cardak, a friend joining me for lunch. Sami opts for the Roast Beef Sammy (”Because my name is Sami,” he reasons), while I go for the creation I invented about three decades ago.

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Maybe I’m just paying more attention these days to how restaurants cut costs while still trying to provide a modicum of originality, but recently I’ve noticed a mini-trend of house-made potato chips.
I first spotted these fried snacks at Hank’s Tavern & Eats in Hyattsville, where Chef Geoff’s team serves a fairly tame basket of barbecued chips.

But during the holiday break, I ordered a plate of waffle-cut potato chips from the Corner Bistro in McLean, which, despite its name, is a kindly neighborhood wine bar that mixes tapas with a smattering of French country dishes. Don’t ask me why such a place serves potato chips, or even why I ordered them, but they do and I did. I regretted it. The chips (pictured above) looked undeniably mouthwatering when the waiter dropped them off, but they were oily, soggy, and under-salted. They had all the crunch of wet cardboard.

A few days later, a friend ordered a barbecue chicken sandwich at Black’s Bar and Kitchen in Bethesda, which came with house-made potato chips. The fried potato slices were everything you’d want from a chip: thin, crispy, spuddy, and salty. They were, in fact, far better than the gloppy sandwich, which I have to admit induced a gag reflex on first bite. I won’t gross you out with the details on that one.

Everything about Chef Geoff’s new establishment, Hank’s Tavern & Eats in Hyattsville’s University Town Center, seems designed to ease a Boomer’s pain during the economic downturn. The space is homey, almost too homey for a restaurant. It feels like a rec room with all those TVs and that easy-to-clean carpet. The music is a non-stop assault of classic rock: The Moody Blues, Neil Young, the Beatles, Foreigner, and the like. You half expect to find a Barcalounger and a used bong in the main dining room.

The menu is also built for comfort, mostly sandwiches, salads, burgers, and a few reasonably priced entrees. There’s even a 33-ounce beer stein, priced around $10, to help raise your spirits even as your stocks plummet. But the thing that really caught my eye was the side of barbecued potato chips. The kitchen makes them in house.

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There are a flood of flavored chips on the market–potato chips, pita chips, even puffed rice and corn thingies. But do they always taste like the advertised ingredients? In this periodic feature, we’ll put the chips to the test. This time we challenge Stacy’s Parmesan Garlic and Herb Pita Chips. Here’s what the City Paper panel thought they tasted like:

Housing Complex reporter Ruth Samuelson: “Garlic…sorry, that’s what it tasted like to me. Maybe ‘pizza’ flavored?”

Loose Lips Mike DeBonis: “Onion powder and Parmesan. Maybe not even Parmesan.”

Senior Writer Jason Cherkis: “Sea salt, sandpaper, tahini or sour cream, boredom.”

Staff Photographer Darrow Montgomery: “Minnesotan Italian restaurant’s idea of garlic and bread.”

Editor Erik Wemple: “All I can taste is garlic.”

Managing Editor Andrew Beaujon: “Garlic, onion, and pepper.”

Me (yes, I knew the flavors going in, but I still tried to taste them on the palate): “Garlic, salt, and toasted cardboard.”

Actual ingredient list: Enriched flour, sunflower oil, Parmesan cheese, sea salt, whole wheat flour, sugar, ground garlic, active yeast, oat fiber, compressed yeast, malted barley flour, inactive yeast, and parsley flakes.