Kyle Chayka: If you think you haven’t encountered Graza, you have. It’s the direct-to-consumer, millennial-branded olive oil that comes in Sriracha-esque squeeze bottles. Its branding is squiggly doodles, black on green. I think the “drizzle” finishing oil is pretty good — as much for the container as the oil. Now, Graza makes potato chips, fried in their own olive oil of course. The chips were so hyped that the brand is now sold out of them, but I managed to grab a bag at my local Foxtrot, which is like an AirSpace form of bodega that only sells D2C products and has been proliferating across DC. (Think Blank Street x Trader Joes, or a worse form of the UK’s Gail’s.) Now Foxtrot is sold out, too.
The chips, to be honest, are delicious. With some friends staying over, Jess and I got through most of a bag before lunchtime. They’re crispy, light, sprinkled with a medium amount of salt, and imbued with the noticeable richness of olive oil. They are something like a highly upgraded version of Lay’s, oily but not too oily. You could have them with tapas or, better yet, pile them up and lay prosciutto over the top. Overall, a worthy addition to the chip canon. But Graza’s branding doesn’t work quite as well on a chip bag as it does on the olive oil squeezy jug, probably because goofiness is more the standard style for chips; it’s not as much of a contrast. The aspirational style for chips these days tends toward gourmet realism, like the line drawings on Spain’s Torres brand.
What I like about Graza’s chips is that they’re tasty without being fancy, the premium-mediocre of fried potatoes. They don’t need to be so upmarket; they just need to be better than the other bags you grab at the bodega walking home drunk from the subway.
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