DC restaurant bringing frozen fries to kitchens in homes and restaurants alike

WASHINGTON (DC News Now) — One D.C.-based restaurant is working to bring quality hand-cut fries to restaurant kitchens and homes alike with the convenience of frozen fries.

Swizzler offers burgers, fried chicken, hot dogs, fries at more at its flagship in Navy Yard and at concessions inside Nationals Park — but in the coming months, its two founders will be offering more to the DMV and beyond.

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Co-founders Jesse Konig and Ben Johnson got their start in the D.C. food industry with a food truck in 2014. The pair met each other while attending Wake Forest University in North Carolina.

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“D.C. just seemed like an amazing, fun place with lots of culinary creativity, lots of talent and an amazing food truck scene,” Konig said.

The pair’s food truck took off, and from 2019 to 2020, Konig said that things were looking up — they were attending farmers’ markets and just signed a lease for their first flagship location in Navy Yard. They were working on the building in March of 2020 to prepare for their late spring opening when lockdowns for the COVID-19 pandemic started.

“It was certainly a bit of an interesting time to be kind of thinking about how we’re going to keep this business going when food trucks were completely shut down, the restaurant industry was really hurt,” Konig said.

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Swizzler ended up turning its shut-down food truck kitchen into a french fry factory and the gears kept turning.

“We started making the same hand-cut fries, but freezing them and shipping them across towns, we could have the same fries in all different places. And it was amazing. People loved it, they were delivering better than our normal fries. They were just as good if not better than our normal hand-cut fries,” said Konig.

Their fries garnered attention on social media — a post from local foodie account Eat DC (which boasted 33.3K followers on the platform X as of Feb. 28) posed the question, “Alright, who’s making great fries these days?”

The thread concluded with a nod to Swizzler’s frozen fries — “For all the restaurants buying frozen, you don’t have to settle for a crappy product. Believe it or not, the best fast food fries in DC are actually frozen, and the team behind @swizzlerfoods is now selling them wholesale,” Eat DC said.

“It was amazing to have people in the comments mentioning us talking about our fries because that’s been the goal from day one — to make sure everything we’re putting out is something we’re proud of. We want to serve ourselves, our team, our family, our friends,” Konig said.

They got started by selling frozen fries to restaurants to help them get quality, handmade hand-cut fries without the time and effort typically needed for them.

“French fries are a lot of work!” Konig said. “If you have a great person on your staff, you don’t want them just sitting around cutting potatoes all day.”

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That adventure is now getting wings of its own — the pair is planning to launch a new brand called Jesse and Ben’s Fries. Konig said that their goal with that brand is to get bags of frozen avocado oil and beef tallow fries into grocery stores in the DMV and even further.

Konig said that an official announcement was still in the works, expected to come at some point in March. After launch, you can expect to find their fries at well-known, natural grocery stores in the mid-Atlantic and the DMV.

Konig said that their fries will be different from products that companies he referred to as “big potato” are churning out — he said that they’re a small business creating a craft product, not a large-scale factory.

Because of this, he said that their prices may not be as low as what you may be used to seeing at stores, but he said that you would be able to get a restaurant-quality fry at home for around $7.99 per bag.

“You get a nice bag of fries, great for a family, you throw it in the oven or the air fryer it’s really easy to make and they come out really high quality, hot and fresh whenever you want,” Konig said.

“We think the world deserves really great fries,” he said.

Konig said to keep an eye on his social media for future updates about Swizzler and Jesse and Ben’s Fries.

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