Spud Daddy Restaurant and the Idaho Potato

Spud Daddy, a brand new restaurant in downtown Boise serves what owner Thomas Watson calls, “the biggest, baddest Idaho Russet potatoes around.” He hopes using Idaho’s most famous product to make a great baked potato with plenty of toppings will translate to success, and based on lines out the door on opening day he might be on to something.

Verbatim:

Insane. Like, I think we had our best-case expectation, we nearly doubled by 1:00.

Opening day for Spud Daddy, a brand new fast-casual restaurant in downtown Boise was a bit of a surprise for owner/founder Thomas Watson.

We had a line out the door from the time we opened till about 2:00 all the way through and sold nearly 1000 meals that quickly.

The famous Idaho Potato is the star here, specifically baked potatoes.

If that sounds familiar, that’s because Watson thought up Potato Days, a multi-day celebration of all things potato held in the Treasure Valley.

That event featured a temporary kitchen also called Spud Daddy,

We almost baked 10,000 baked potatoes in two days flat.   

We obviously had a commercial kitchen, got really good at baking potatoes in bulk. But we're on TikTok and we're seeing all these baked potato restaurants in Europe blowing up. And we thought, why does Idaho not have an excellent potato operation? It should be Chipotle-like. It should be fast. It should be friendly. It should be inexpensive. And we were just kind of surprised that wasn't a thing. And I think that we felt like we were the right people to make that a thing. And that was basically it. We thought it was fun. We thought it was cool. We're good at brisket. We're good at ham. We're good at bacon. And we thought, well, Let's make a great baked potato.

Watson said opening a restaurant has been a very different beast from the temporary kitchen, and he’s been working to refine and speed up the process.

We do have a lot of assistance. Shout out to the Idaho Potato Commission. They've given us their chef who has, I mean, video called us and given us advice and helped us think through this process to create something as good as a pizza, but it's a baked potato. And I think that's a trick. And I think we have the right mix.

You'll walk up to the line, we'll ask you what kind of butter you want. So it'll start with a plain butter, garlic butter, chili butter. We're mashing it up with salt, seasoning it. Then you're going through the line. I mean, it's cheese, it's brisket, it's pit ham, it's a lot of bacon, chimichurri. We've got a daddy sauce, we've got a farm sauce, we've got chopped jalapenos. I'm missing a whole bunch of things. There's about 20 toppings. We got corn salsa, sour cream, on and on and on. So it's literally 20 delicious ingredients. Everything is house made in the kitchen every single morning.

How crispy can the skin be? How fluffy can the interior be? That's the goal. Like we want the perfect massive baked potato. And we want to do that fast and inexpensive.

They also have an unusual gift shop.

And I'll shout out Flying M. I love Flying M's gift shop. And I thought, Flying M has such a cool thing, but I want the same thing, but sort of with a farm, ag, but still be fun, still be funny. Like there's a lot of these shops out here that are maybe hyper corporate, not very fun to shop. And I thought, I think we have the thing where we can make this artsy fartsy, but also appreciating ag, appreciating our country culture. We are, after all, like a company who's buying product from farms. every day of the week. I'm like, how do we have a gift shop in Boise, Idaho? But still, the thing is celebrating ag, farm, but it's fun.

Every other item in there is something that celebrates butter or celebrates potato, or it celebrates Idaho, but maybe in a funny, kitschy way.

And those extra-large baker potatoes are supplied by Sun Valley Potatoes, a grower-owned cooperative in Minidoka County.

We're hoping they can be our main supplier, and they never run out of potatoes. So our big thing was going out to the farmers and seeing who could supply us with 40 count potatoes, the ridiculously large one, and never run out. They were the only ones that said yes to that request.

Watson says they will soon also be selling beer as well as offering Amsterdam Fries.

That's where we'll sell the massive cones of fries with Parmesan and aioli right on the patio.

I never would have ever, ever, ever seen myself opening a restaurant.

The only restaurant I would ever start would be one that has such a strong niche that there's a possibility of mega success. And we thought the potato was just the thing.  

 I mean, probably because I've seen the power of the Idaho potato through potato days, where it's blown my expectations out of the water every single time. And that is straight luck and alignment with a product that people love. So there is no credit that anybody should get for that. It's the Idaho potato. People love it. People want to see it. We have access to the best ones. And that's that.