French Fry Diary 240: Cool Dog Cafe's New Dipping Sauces

Just when you think a good thing can't get any better, it does. The folks at the Cool Dog Café in Cherry Hill are always thinking of ways to make their already great food and service better. If they're not making terrific weekly specials, they are making leaps and bounds with their fabulous fries.

Thus week, it's the latter, as they have added some spectacular dipping sauces for their "Belgian Frites." Here in the States, it's all about ketchup and maybe barbeque sauce for French fries. The British like their malt vinegar (which Cool Dog has on their tables, by the way), but in Europe, it's all about the dipping sauces, mostly of a mayo base, and about the varieties.

Now Cool Dog is trying to bring a little bit of that European magic to Cherry Hill. They've introduced four unique, homemade, mayo-based sauces: Dijon mayo, curry mayo, Mexi-ketchup and kaboom sauce. We got brave and ordered the curry mayo. This had an interesting taste that contrasted the fries and you can really feel the curry. The in-laws got the Dijon mayo, which was very mustardy, as it should be. While they were good, we decided we preferred ketchup and malt vinegar. Not a knock, just a preference.

After hearing from owner Ira what was in the other two sauces, I wish we had tried them. I did come back on another trip to try the kaboom sauce. Wow. Let's just say the kaboom sauce has a long fuse. At first taste, it's pretty good, an excellent dipping sauce. A few seconds go by and the sizzle starts - ka-boom. Oh yeah, that's some kind of special hot. Only for the brave who like that kind of stuff, it's good, but just too hot for me.

I'm still waiting for them to add the Jack Daniels glaze to the dipping sauces or other barbeque flavors - then I'm on board. In meantime these are still very good, get on over to the Cool Dog and try 'em out.