As diehard Dick's devotees can attest, few foods absorb alcohol more effectively than French fries. Portable, cheap, and featuring a near-ideal balance of grease and carbohydrates, fries are the perfect stumbling-drunk-up-the-street-at-2:30-a.m. snack.

What better location, then, for a place devoted exclusively to fries than a tiny side-entrance slot at the corner of 10th Avenue and Pike, at the precise point where Neumo's discharges hundreds of hungry patrons at the stroke of 2 every weekend night? And what better genus of fry for such a location than Belgian frites, those kosher-salt-flecked, thick-cut, crispy-limp fries that derive their texture from a cooking process that involves blanching the potatoes in oil, cooling them completely, then frying them yet again?

The menu at Frites: Belgian Fries, which opened so recently it has neither a phone nor posted hours, is as straightforward and to-the-point as a vodka tonic: Small ($2.50), medium ($4), and large ($5) paper cones of fries are served up naked or adorned with any of 13 variously whitish sauces (25 cents a pop, or five for $1); there's also an entirely superfluous cheese stick and corn dog. The fries, which come lanced with tiny wooden forks for dipping into the mostly mayonnaise-based sauces, are sizzling hot, lightly crisp, deceptively ungreasy, and deadly as a heart attack. The sauces include garlic aioli, rosemary mayonnaise, poblano ranch, pesto mayo, and a traditional tartar sauce, and are mostly fantastic (especially the rosemary mayo), although 13 kinds of anything is overkill in my book. (I couldn't tell the difference, for example, between the regular mayo and the European-style mayo called "fritesaus." And the Greek-style tzatziki was just plain weird.)

No matter: This tiny, hole-in-the-wall frites stand fills a cheap-late-night-dining void. And, if you don't mind stumbling around the office in a carb-induced stupor, you don't even have to stay up until 2:00 in the morning: Frites is also open at lunch.