Hangover Fries at RnR in Scottsdale Will Ease Your Post-Bender Pain

The Guilty Pleasure: Hangover Fries
Where to Get It: RnR Restaurant & Bar
Price: $9.00
What it Really Costs: The unavoidable feeling of self-loathing that comes after you have turned your stomach into a temporary human grease trap.

Old-school drinking lore suggests that, after a night of too many beers and cocktails, the best way to stave off the painful symptoms of an impending hangover is to consume as much greasy food as possible. Gorging yourself on stacks of syrupy pancakes and heaps of bacon and eggs, some swear, is the best way to slow down the absorption of alcohol into the bloodstream. 

If you happen to ascribe to the philosophy of coating your stomach with plenty of grease and gunk after one too many Long Island Iced Teas, there might not be a more fitting dish to keep in your post-bender arsenal than the Hangover Fries at RnR Restaurant & Bar in Old Town Scottsdale.

RnR, that bro-friendly bastion of Old Town drinking and socializing, is not exactly the kind of greasy spoon diner or burrito drive-thru joint normally associated with cheap, post-drinking grub. It seems more like the kind of place where hangovers are born, rather than eased. 

But it is home to Hangover Fries, a dish beautiful in its simplicity and utter lack of pretension. When you put in your order, the dish tends to come out fast, as if the kitchen knew you were on the brink of boozy exhaustion and had been warming up the frying pan in anticipation of your arrival.

The fries arrive in a searingly hot round bowl, roughly the size of a small porcelain bathtub, packed with a messy heap of crispy French fries drowning in sticky globs of melted cheddar cheese. Greasy nubs of bacon, chopped tomatoes, and a judicious sprinkling of jalapeño rounds, plus a tangy zig-zag of sour cream, add to the whole delightful mess. At the top of the heap, two fried eggs, welded together and served sunny-side up, seem to stare up at you from the bowl. 

And so you pick up the first fry, then the second, and pretty soon the whole thing is gone. It's a dish designed to appeal to all your basest food instincts, which is to say it lures you in that special way that only cheese and carbs can. It's a triumph of junk food, a collection of fat and salt in all its most tempting forms. 

Sure, it may not be a nutritionally sound meal. And there are no promises made that the dish will prevent the onset of your hangover. But, at the very least, Hangover Fries are so tasty, they will distract you from your pain until the ibuprofen kicks in.