The Chain Restaurant French Fries That Vegetarians Should Avoid

By virtue of their not eating meat, vegetarians likely keep a closer eye on ingredients than your average meat-eating diner. Thankfully most restaurants offer a number of vegetarian options, and if nothing else, french fries are typically a safe bet. At their most basic, fries are just potatoes that have been cooked in hot oil — but not every chain restaurant keeps it that simple. In fact, there's one major national chain where vegetarians — and by extension, vegans — should skip the french fries to avoid meat products.

At Buffalo Wild Wings, which is known for its 26 sauces and dry rubs and has over 1,300 restaurants in the U.S. (Texas and California have the most, at 124 and 100, respectively), the fries are made with the addition of beef shortening. In fact, a lot of items that most of us would assume to be vegetarian, like the potato wedges, onion rings, tots, and even its house-made tortilla chips, are fried in beef shortening, and so cannot claim to be meat-free products.

McDonald's fry recipe hasn't used beef tallow for about 35 years, but Steak and Shake recently announced they plan to. It has been generally agreed, tallow helps give fries a signature crispness, but it does make them inaccessible to vegetarians (as well as to people following gluten-free diets — because in addition to being a meat product, beef tallow also tends to contain wheat).

If you're a vegetarian and you have a fast-casual Smashburger near you, you can absolutely eat their Veggie Smash, but you cannot down the chain's fries, tots, or crispy Brussels sprouts, because they also use the meaty fat in their fryers. And returning to the sit-down dining world, Outback Steakhouse also puts beef tallow in its fryers. So any seemingly vegetarian foods you order that take a dip in the bubbling beefy oil can no longer be called vegetarian post-cook — including their fries, Bloomin' Fried Shrimp, Sydney Shrooms, and infamous Bloomin' Onion (among others).