Fish and chips: what to order and how to spot a proper chippy

Overview

Fish and chips is not London’s own dish, and it would be dishonest to pretend it is. It is the national dish of Britain, eaten everywhere from Cornwall to the far north of Scotland, and its heartland in the popular imagination is the seaside, not the capital. What London has is a genuine claim on one half of its origin — and that claim is worth telling, because it is also the honest reason the dish appears in a London food guide at all.

The fried fish came first, and it came to London with Jewish immigrants: a batter-fried white fish, eaten cold, was a Sephardic dish sold from street baskets and shops in the poorer eastern parishes well before anyone paired it with a chip. The chip — a thick baton of potato fried in fat — is usually traced to the North and to Lancashire. Fish and chips is the marriage of the two, and it is the marriage, not either parent, that became the national dish. The story that a single shop in the East End was the first to sell them together in the 1860s is repeated everywhere and is genuinely disputed; a mill town in the north makes the same claim for the same decade. Treat it as folklore worth knowing, not as a settled fact: what is certain is that both threads are real and that one of them ran through this city.

So the article’s promise is narrower than a seaside town’s would be. London has good fish and chips and it has bad, tourist-facing versions of it; what follows is how to tell them apart and what to actually say at the counter.

What to order

The default order is cod and chips or haddock and chips — a fillet of white fish in crisp batter, a heap of thick-cut chips. Cod is the softer, flakier, more neutral fish and the usual London default; haddock has a little more flavour and is the northern and Scottish preference. Both are correct; ordering haddock is not a test you can fail. Beyond those two, plaice turns up (flatter, more delicate) and, in the older shops, rock — an economical name for dogfish, boneless and firm, and a good order if you see it.

The chips are the other half and they are not fries. A proper chip is thick, steamed soft inside its fried shell, and it wants salt and malt vinegar — the sharp brown vinegar shaken on at the counter, not the wine vinegar of a salad. “Salt and vinegar?” is the question you will be asked; “yes” is almost always the right answer.

The sides are where regional loyalties show, and it is worth knowing the vocabulary even in London:

• mushy peas — marrowfat peas cooked down to a thick green purée, faintly sweet. The classic accompaniment, and the most divisive; order a small pot before you commit a plate to them.
• curry sauce — a thin, mild, chip-shop curry gravy, poured over the chips. A northern habit that has spread; it has nothing to do with the city’s actual curry houses and everybody knows it.
• scraps or bits — the loose fragments of fried batter left in the fryer, sometimes free for the asking. A northern thing more than a London one, but worth knowing the word.
• tartare sauce and a wedge of lemon come with the fish in a sit-down place; a pickled onion or a pickled egg from the jar on the counter is the old takeaway habit.

What to avoid

The tell of a bad version is the batter, and you can read it before you taste it. Good batter is thin, blistered and pale gold, and it shatters; it was mixed and fried to order. Batter that is thick, uniform, deep brown and slightly greasy has usually been sitting under a heat lamp, and a fillet that is a perfect rectangle was battered frozen in a factory, not by the shop. A counter with everything already fried and stacked is serving passing trade, not cooking for you.

Be wary of the fish that is cheap for the wrong reason. A shop that only ever offers “fish and chips” with no species named, at a price well below the cod-and-haddock places nearby, is often frying a cheaper, blander white fish under a generic label. Naming the fish is a sign the shop is confident in it.

And avoid the ones that have dressed the dish up for the postcard. A chippy near a major sight with photographs of the plate in the window, a fillet arriving on a slate with a “gourmet” label and a garnish, or a price that has drifted far above the ordinary chippy a few streets back, is charging for the location and the styling. The real thing is plain, wrapped in paper, and served without ceremony — the honesty of that presentation is part of what you are buying.

Practicalities

A fillet of cod or haddock with chips runs to roughly £9 to £14 at an ordinary London chippy, a little less if you take it away rather than sit in, and more only when the location is doing the pricing. A number far below that range usually signals the cheaper unnamed fish above; a number far above it signals the postcode. Sides — peas, a saveloy, a battered sausage — are a pound or two each.

The dish has no single mealtime, but it has a rhythm the seaside gave it and London kept: lunchtime and early evening are when a busy chippy fries fastest and freshest, because that is when it sells, and a fillet cooked into a lunchtime queue is a better fillet than one that has waited. Friday retains a faint pull — the old habit of fish on a Friday still fills the shops — so a Friday teatime is the dish at its most alive and also its busiest.

Cash matters slightly less than it once did; the city guide’s card-and-phone rule holds here as everywhere, though a small, old, deep-fat-and-formica chippy is the kind of place likeliest to keep a card minimum or a cash-only sign, so a note in the pocket is not wasted. Eat it hot and soon: fish and chips is built for the walk home from the counter, and it is a lesser, softer thing by the time it is cold — the batter loses its crack within minutes, which is the whole argument for buying it where you will be eating it.