Today is National Fish and Chip Day, which one might be forgiven for failing to notice amid the 80th anniversary commemorations for D-Day. There are bigger fish to fry. But while I’ll be raising a glass to all those who took part in the Normandy landings, it won’t be over a fish supper in London. Because the capital is the worst place in the country to eat our national dish.
I should know: I wrote the Standard’s best fish and chip guide. The best in London, sure. But if anyone told me that these were the best fish and chips in Britain, I’d feel as if I’d been slapped round the face with a wet haddock.
Only one London chippie, Stones Fish and Chips in Acton, made it to the recent finals of the Fish and Chip Awards — and went home with an empty haul. Ship Deck in Caerphilly, south Wales, was crowned the best takeaway in the UK, while Knights in Glastonbury was the best eat-in restaurant.
Why are fish and chips in London such a damp squib when the capital excels at every style of cooking under the sun? The UK’s first fish and chip shop was opened in Bow around 1860. But familiarity has fed contempt. Travel websites throw up fish and chips as the British dish tourists are keenest to try in London. Luckily for them, they will find it everywhere from Wetherspoons to Harrods. But it doesn’t mean they’re getting the real deal.
I must admit to some regional bias; I grew up in Lancashire, where a Northern chippy tea is a full spread of mushy peas, scraps and bread and butter, with a pot of gravy for dunking the battered haddock. The cost? Around a tenner.
Southern softies, alas, have poshed up fish and chips, starting with swapping flavourful haddock for blander cod. Several of the restaurants on the Standard’s list sell deep-fried lobster and Dover sole, too. Tom Kerridge flogs a market-day fish for £37 at Harrods while the average price for fish and chips on our round-up is £18. At Knights in Glasto, cod and chips costs £10.90.
Then there’s the quality of the fish itself. London has the most famous fish market in the country at Billingsgate, but that freshness rarely seems to survive a dip in the deep-fat fryer. Perhaps the fryers themselves are the problem; fish-and-chip aficionados claim that London chippies remain wedded to old-style fryers in which the temperature of the oil drops when protein or potato is added, resulting in a limp chip and saggy batter.
True, fish and chip shops have been hit harder than many strands of hospitality by rising prices for fish and oil. And London is the least affordable place in the country to run a restaurant. But the point about fish and chips is that it is the UK’s original street food, popularised in the 19th century as an affordable hit of protein and carbs for the working class, parcelled up in newspaper with change from a £10 note and eaten on the way home from the pub or, ideally, harbourside as a stiff easterly whips in off the North Sea. Swap the wooden fork on the pavement for silverware in Mayfair and the soul (sole?) of the dish is lost.
Still, if Londoners seem to have it bad, spare a thought for New Yorkers. En route to a Broadway show a couple of weeks ago, I walked past the Times Square outpost of Gordon Ramsay Fish and Chips: a sorry-looking affair from Britain’s most famous chef cashing in on our most famous food. This city isn’t perfect, but at least we don’t have Ramsay shilling his £16 cod and chips combo. Yet.
