Who needs a restaurant meal when one has a bag of crisps? From prawn cocktail (Skips) and roast beef (Monster Munch) to Asian chilli beef (Kettle Chips) and pepperoni pizza (Walkers), there are as many crisp flavours as there are cuisines. More than a few are influenced by restaurant trends — ultra-expensive Italian truffle season has filtered down to the high street via Torres — but now chefs are reclaiming the potato patch for themselves. For the humble crisp has become the coolest ingredient in London’s hottest restaurants.
It's there in an omelette with Iberian ham shoulder, caramelised onion and crisps at Lolo (102 Bermondsey Street, SE1 3UB, josepizarro.com), and in the hummus with masabacha and homemade hot crisps at Agora (2-4 Bedale Street, SE1 9AL, agora.london). There’s escabeche with mussels and crisps at Toklas (1 Surrey Street, WC2R 2ND, toklaslondon.com), morcilla crisps topped with chorizo, garlic and roasted peppers at Tollington’s (72 Tollington Park, N4 3AJ, @tollingtons.fishbar) and Le Noir de Bigorre ham and crisps with smoked piparra peppers at Ibai (92 Bartholomew Close, EC1A 7BN, ibai.london).
“Since the Nineties, crisp manufactures have always kept one eye on restaurant menus for ideas and trying to keep up with trends like Thai chilli, sriracha, ’nduja and so on,” says Natalie Whittle, a former Financial Times food and drink editor whose book Crunch: An Ode to Crisps (£13.99 on Amazon) came out in October. “It's overdue for restaurants to look in the other direction at crisps.”
Crunch is published by Faber & Faber, the venerable house where T. S. Eliot was a director. If there were any doubt that there is a poetry in crisps, listen to how Ollie Templeton, co-founder and head chef of Carousel (19-23 Charlotte Street, W1T 1RW, carousel-london.com), describes crisp appreciation: “The first crisp is the only conscious one and every bite after that is an impulse from your subconscious. Crisps consistently do this in a way that bread doesn’t.”
Templeton serves crisps with fermented tomato blended with sherry vinegar, olive oil and dried chilli, inspired by the street-side crisps he enjoyed in Mexico. “It’s always fun trying different flavours in different countries,” he says by way of explanation. Whittle agrees that there are crisp influences that deserve importing to the land of salt and vinegar and cheese and onion — “I'd really like to see a switch to the French and Spanish thing of producing a little bowl of crisps with drinks you order from a café table” — though she says not everything is worth adopting: her numerous attempts at making Ferran Adrià’s crisp omelette have resulted in soggy, not crisp, crisps.
That said, the most successful crisp influences currently in London are European. Ibai is French Basque, Agora is Greek and Lolo is Spanish — as is the dish of mussel escabeche which head chef Chris Shaw serves at Toklas, with the traditional bread swapped out for crisps. “You can’t beat the combination of salt, oil and acid in a crisp,” Shaw says. “You can get such impactful flavours delivered through seasoning and also a range of textures depending on what shape the crisps are cut into, how finely they’re sliced and how dark they are taken in the frying process.”
The secret, of course, is not to serve any old crisp. Homemade is essential, as is home seasoned. Agora’s crisps are flavoured with garlic, chilli, paprika, oregano, kombu dashi, vinegar powder, cumin and salt, and any excess crumb is used as a garnish for hummus.
Carousel’s crisps are seasoned with salt and fried herb stalks and blended into a powder. Richard Foster, Ibai’s head chef, was inspired to create his ham and crisp dish by Torres Iberico ham crisps during lockdown with the ambition of recreating the flavour without the synthetic aftertaste. “I also didn’t want to just serve a plate of sliced charcuterie,” he adds. “Because you know what is better than sliced ham? Sliced ham with salty pork-fat crisps. The smoked peppers I serve on top are the icing on the cake.”
Every chef, of course, has their favourite crisp. Shaw and Templeton each favour Monster Munch. Foster loves Extra Flamin’ Hot Wotsits or Doritos. Agora founder David Carter likes a balsamic vinegar Kettle Chip — “zingly and tingly”. For José Pizarro, it’s any salt and extra-virgin olive oil flavoured crisp made with 100 per cent potato.
“Crisps are quite simply nostalgic,” Pizarro says. “When I open a pack, put a crisp in my mouth and crunch it down, it brings me a sense of pure joy. I think they’re appearing on menus because chefs are realising that it’s the simple things that make us happy. Sometimes crisps are a vessel of seasoning, sometimes a vessel for extra texture and sometimes just a vessel of joy.”
As the slogan for Seabrook, my own favourite crisp, used to say: “More than a snack.” Because at long last, crisps are now a proper meal.
