FISH N CHIPS
Perfect pair
Britain's sagging national street food gets a crisp, upper lift at London Grill.
By Rick Nichols
Source: Philadelphia Inquirer
Published: 2001-06-10
Section: INQUIRER MAGAZINE | In Dining
The sun has long been setting on fish and chips, England's proud national dish - or national street food, at least.
First went the fish wrappers, cones twisted from day-old London Daily Mirrors, victims in the 1960s of the emergent sanitation police.
Then came the foreign competition - waves of hot curries, Malaysian stalls and wonderfully crunchy falafels.
Besides, fish and chips had hardly kept up with the times: The oil in your car was changed more often than that in the fryers. The fish was infamously soggy, not so much a foil for the greasy fries as a limply different shape.
There was a time, of course, when fish and chips were the nouveau ethnic food on London's streets.
My Oxford Companion to Food dates the proliferation of the combination to the 1860s, when Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe (fish fryers) and Irish emigres (potato lovers) were drawn to the city together.
By itself "fried fish in the Jewish fashion" was already at large in London - sometimes served cold with a hunk of bread - when Thomas Jefferson visited after the American Revolution. It appeared in the first Jewish cookbook published in English, in 1846. The fried fish-fried potato link was all that was missing.
I'd sworn off the stuff after a particularly leaden batch at a chips shop in Hammersmith, on the outskirts of London, a few years ago. It had lived up to its sorry reputation - dull, flavorless and stultifyingly heavy.
Then the other night, I had an inexplicable hankering. (Perhaps it was the ditty my wife has been teaching our 5-year-old granddaughter: Fish 'n' chips and vin-e-gar, vin-e-gar, vin-e-gar . . . pepper, pepper, pepper POT!)
I was sitting at the bar of the London Grill at 23d and Fairmount, where they've had fish and chips on the menu ($8.95, and half price at Happy Hour) for 10 years.
The platter was a revelation - a big, exuberant, disheveled serving, the white fish (it's typically fresh fluke or flounder) steamy and sweet, the beer-batter coating bubbled, tempura-crisp and mercifully thin, the french fries hand-cut and heaped in a crazy pile.
It was served with demitasses of malt vin-e-gar and tart, lemony homemade tartar sauce.
Nobody else's I've had in town quite measured up. Not the chewy, dense, leathery-coated fish and thick, limp fries at Best of British, the charming tearoom on Germantown Avenue in Chestnut Hill.
Not even the very decent rendition at the Black Sheep, the lively Irish pub at 247 S. 17th St., where the cod is clean and fluffy and the coating only mildly greasy. (The fries, though, taste like those starch-sprayed things you get at Burger King.)
What's the secret? I ask Chef Michael McNally, whose former wife, Terry, runs the front of the house and remains his partner in the business.
Maybe it's the yeasty beer, usually a lager or porter, that gives airiness to the batter, he says. Maybe it's that the fish moves well and is always fresh. Maybe it's the deep-frying tips - aimed at driving the fat out of fried foods - that he has picked up from John Martin Taylor, the fry guru from Charleston, S.C.
He doesn't mention that, here at the London, Terry is Jewish and he is Irish.
I'm sure, in fact, that it's purely coincidental.
Rick Nichols' e-mail address is
rnichols@phillynews.com.
Illustration/Photo: Fish and chips - a combination born of the meeting of two cultures in mid-19th century London. (Photography by Michael Bryant)
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