I am just a lone woman, eating a pickled egg and asking Poppies to love her. Yet, from my table in the new Portobello Road branch, the love is not reciprocated. Solo dining is one of my specialist subjects, and my advice for lone wolves hoping for a walk-in anywhere is to turn up slightly earlier than the rush, when the staff are likely to be less fractious and dismissive of you turning up to clutter a table.
Poppies starts serving its famous fish and chips from 11am, so I arrived 10 minutes before noon. Once inside, and as usual when I’m on my tod, I scan the room so I’m able to dispute whichever dismal crevice the server might try to stuff me in. By the toilet door? Next to the Epos machine? In this all-new Poppies, the worst seats out of the 64 available are those next to the open front door, where the queue is sorted into takeaway and eat-in diners. Armed with the knowledge that I’m intending to spend about £30 on regular fish with chips and a slice of apple pie, I fight the server’s urge to seat me there. “How about there or there?” I ask, pointing a hand towards a couple of nicer spots, but he seems to have suddenly become acutely myopic.
While all this is going on, in the background the sound system is playing quirky, Noël Coward-esque ditties, the fryers are bubbling gently, and there are Sarson’s malt vinegar and farty tomato sauce bottles on every table. Staff are dressed in natty white jackets and there are jellied eels and Cartmel sticky toffee pudding on the menu, so I concentrate on the positives, rather than on the wind now blowing my bouffant.
Poppies, which started out in London’s East End 60 years ago, has a fine reputation for its fish and chips, but has of late slipped into Harry Ramsden’s territory, offering a rosy, yesteryear take on what the Good Old British Chippy used to be: think battered saveloy and chips with a side order of Disney or Paddington. This new Portobello Market-friendly branch is full of tourists, possibly having their first ever taste of our most famous fayre: battered sausages, plates of bread and butter, and jugs of Bisto gravy (yes, it’s even branded on the menu).
If the Italians sitting near me looked confused at their pricey plates of sepia stodge, I can’t blame them. Chippy food is the coddling stuff of this small, wet island, and it is dear to my heart, because it perked up a cold, beige, northern childhood. Chic sorts dressed in Balenciaga will never write home effusively to Napoli about mushy peas and bowls of authentic Heinz beans and, after eating here, neither will they come away much the wiser about how we salt of the earth folk once ate. According to the website, Poppies offers a slice of “London’s rich culinary history”, but then serves “seasonal salad”, grilled mackerel and margaritas to passers-by who can’t see how wildly inauthentic all this is. Also, a pedant would tell Poppies that chips with curry sauce or gravy were never part of southern culinary history; southerners used to like their chips offensively dry, and it was the north that educated them otherwise.
Such opinions have led me to eat £1.75 pickled eggs alone in restaurants. Food is plonked down. The egg, cut in half and served in a bowl with a sprig of parsley, is inoffensively pickled, and I need a pickled egg to cause me genuine pain via its soaking of malt vinegar; I also need the yolk to be grey or mauve. A regular cod, about as big as my hand and served with roughly 40 chips, costs £18.95 and comes with a small pot of bland tartare sauce. The fish is nicely cooked, but the batter is too light and needs lots of salt. Curry sauce, which is bang-on-the-money 1980s chip shop-style stuff, is an extra £3.50 and inexplicably turns up in a dessert bowl. It’s all fine, but only fine, and I want to chivvy everyone in the place – the Italians, the Americans, the Japanese – on to a coach and take them to Stranraer to eat vast bundles of salty chips and thickly battered fish that sticks to newspaper. There will be no mojitos, but we can instead all share a bottle of Barr’s Scotch Cola, wiping the rim as we go.
“Can I have some apple pie?” I ask my waiter, who ignores me as if I am on day release.
“No, we do not have pie,” he says.
“OK, how about sticky toffee pudding, or just ice-cream?” I say.
He looks pained: “No, there are no puddings today,” he says. “Pudding is more of a night thing,” and promptly disappears. I sense they all wish I’d disappear, too. The temerity of me taking up space in this prime piece of real estate with my demands for a scoop of vanilla.
I stand my ground and try another waiter: “Are you not doing any desserts today?”
“Yes!” he says, but then falters. “I mean, no.”
“Yes or no?” I ask.
“No,” he says.
“And why is that?”
“Um, suppliers,” he says. “Try another day.”
The solo diner’s life can be one of humiliation. I shan’t be going back to Poppies. They’ve had their chips.
Poppies 152-154 Portobello Road, London W11, 020-4568 7720. Open all week, 11am-11pm. From about £27 a head for two courses, plus drinks and service
