How a small, war-scarred French town became the champion of chips

On September 28, Arras stages the ‘French Fry World Championship’ – a celebration of the humble potato

Arras’s Grand Place is lively, but not specifically crowded, in the calm of a late summer evening. The last of the sunlight is burning out on the Flemish-Baroque houses around its perimeter, the rounded noses of their distinctly shaped façades pointing upwards into the slowly darkening sky. And most of the al-fresco seats at the bars on its south and west flanks are in use, locals chatting at Le Divin and Brussel’s Cafe as the twilight deepens.
Every table tells an obvious story of the evening’s progress – in the many goblet glasses, either empty and yet to be cleared, or filled with the strong, dark-brown beer so loved in the Hauts-de-France region (and over the border in Belgium, 30 miles to the north). Even so, the mood is quiet, conversations bubbling softly, rather than bouncing off the cobbles.
The square will be considerably noisier – and certainly much busier – on Saturday September 28, when it stages an event which comes with no less vaunted a title than that of the “French Fry World Championship” (le Championnat du Monde de la Frite).
This will be quite the celebration of the humble potato – in its crisp, sliced, oil-tossed iteration. A mixture of professional and amateur cooks will compete across six categories – including “authentic fries” (as generally sold in friteries in northern France and Belgium), “global fries” (international variations on the theme) and the gloriously named “fries of promise” (made by students in catering schools). 
They will have their efforts appraised by suitably qualified judges, including Florent Ladeyn (a celebrity chef, familiar to French television viewers, whose Michelin-starred restaurant Auberge du Vert Mont is in Boeschepe, just below the Belgian border) and Alexandre Gauthier (whose own feted restaurant La Grenouillère – at Montreuil-sur-Mer, close to Le Touquet – is in the double-Michelin-star bracket). And the public will be able to feast on the results while keeping a close watch to make sure that nobody bends the rules – all chips and accompanying sauces must be prepared in full, from raw ingredients, within the square.
The contest will be hard-fought but good-natured. Because if Arras’s claim to be, effectively, the home of a foodstuff as ubiquitous as the chip sounds like something of an overreach, it is a statement made with tongue relatively in cheek. One of the supporting pieces of evidence is the 16th-century existence of one Charles de l’Ecluse, a pioneering botanist, born in the town in 1526, who was one of the first Europeans to attempt to grow the potato – freshly “discovered” in South America – on the “other” side of the Atlantic.
But more simply, the event is a clever idea, pushed into the wider world on something of a whim, which has flourished. Back in October 2022, Hauts-de-France was announced as the European Region of Gastronomy for 2023. So it was that its 11th-biggest town (Arras is a place of just 43,000 people) offered its services via the jaunty suggestion of a salute to the fabulous frite. Last year’s championship was also the first. There was a chance that it would go almost unnoticed. But on that October day, competitors from seven nations (Canada, Thailand, Japan, Germany and Britain, as well as France and Belgium) took part – and 50,000 spectators turned up. Saturday’s attendance is expected to exceed this.
In truth, if anywhere has the right to sell itself as the global headquarters of the French fry, it might be Arras – or, at least, the upper corner of the country in question, where punnets of chips, usually devoured with paper tubs of mayonnaise, are as much a part of the evening ritual as those potent ales. That both the 2023 winners hailed from the region was probably inevitable, but each – Friterie Mestre in Lille and food-truck owner Philippe Frenoi – has achieved a higher profile as a consequence of their triumph. And Arras is not short of friteries of its own.
Friterie Arrageoise and Friterie Queen sit side-by-side, just off the south side of the Grand Place. The fries that I sample at Friterie Meunier, on the adjacent Place des Héros, are delicious; freshly made, lightly salted, and wholly moreish.
The championship is also a success because it emphasises a vibrant present in a town that – in terms of tourism, at least – is generally viewed in the past tense. A dark past, as well.
The buildings on and around the Places des Héros sing of the town’s glory days as a busy hub of medieval commerce; in particular, the grand Hotel de Ville – which, although completely reconstructed during the 1920s, is stubbornly 16th century in its origins and its appearance, its 246ft belfry complementing the Notre-Dame Cathedral behind.
But the public gaze generally drifts back to the First World War. Indeed, it is impossible to overlook the connection. Not just in the many memorials and cemeteries in the town and its surroundings (the Canadian National Vimy Memorial, dedicated to the many dead of April 1917’s fierce Battle of Vimy Ridge, is six miles to the north), but in the knowledge that Arras was all but on the Allied frontline, and was 80 per cent destroyed in the firestorm. 
Coming in on the train from Lille – an easy, air-conditioned ride of just 39 minutes – it dawns on me that I am crossing a blood barrier; that the station before I disembark – Douai, 15 miles from Arras – was on the other, German, side of the trenches.
Not that this chapter of Arras’s history is not fascinating. It is especially compelling at Carrière Wellington, a one-time limestone quarry whose existing tunnels were expanded by miners from New Zealand and Britain, in a bid to bypass the German fortifications via an ingenious underground route. That the plan was both a success and a failure (a surprise attack on April 9 1917 helped to push the enemy back seven miles, but cost so many lives that the momentum was squandered) gifts an extra poignancy to these dank passageways.
The area’s wartime heritage is further emphasised by the Arras Citadelle. This impressive star-shaped fortress was devised for the battles of a different era – crafted by Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban, Louis XIV’s formidable military engineer, between 1668 and 1672, as the “sun king” reinforced the outer edges of his kingdom. It was so good at its job that it was not decommissioned until 2010. Now, locals can explore a 72-hectare site where cafés serve coffee in former barracks – and trails cut into woodland that was closed off for centuries.
Even here, though, the darkness of more recent history casts its long shadow. One section of the inner defences – a grassy space between two high walls – has been set aside to remember the 218 members of the French Resistance who were executed here by the German occupiers between 1941 and 1944. Their names – pinned to the brickwork on carved plaques, on the very site where they were gunned down – have a lingering power.
It was the American media which, in 2003 – erasing the word “French” in smug protest at France’s opposition to that spring’s invasion of Iraq – coined the phrase “freedom fries”. 
Clearly, in Arras you can have both.
Arras is a simple half-hour train ride from Lille. Return journeys to Lille from London St Pancras with Eurostar cost from £103 per person (0343 218 6186). 
Double rooms at the four-star Hotel Mercure Arras Centre Gare (0033 32123 8888) cost from £111 per night.
September 28; free entry.

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