Few pieces of ostensibly mundane catering equipment can stir emotion like the counter in a fish and chip shop. You will know the kind of thing. A gleaming stretch of metal and glass that is instantly redolent of lamp-lit Pukka Pies beneath the warmer, the unseen roil and sputter of deep-fat fryers, a jar of pickled eggs first opened some time around the Suez Crisis, and the anticipatory agony of a Friday night queue, inching forward through a cloud of onion vinegar scent. If half the pleasure of a proper chippy tea is a kind of gastronomic edging, then the counter is the first irresistible act of foreplay.
At Tollington’s in Finsbury Park — a Spanish-accented overhaul of a derelict chippy from Four Legs chef Ed McIlroy — this fast-disappearing vestige of British dining culture has been reinvented as something new entirely. Preserved and buffed to a mirrored shine, it is the dividing border between a hectic open kitchen and an unruly dining room; the thing that dishevelled young Londoners lean against with their brutally cold £2.30 cañas of Estrella, and a display case for fresh tomatoes, melons, bronzed puffs of devilled crab fritters and a stacked armoury of slender baguettes. Now and again, McIlroy will clamber on top of it, Coyote Ugly-style, to retrieve an industrial-sized bottle of olive oil from an elevated storage shelf.
