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Comment by jwdunne | Hacker News Reader

You know what, I hate fish and chips. Far too stodgy. The hit of deep fried carbs makes my mind feel fuzzy. It's not worth it for what's ultimately a bland meal. Maybe people who like acidic food can get past that with copious amounts of vinegar or lemon juice but I can't stand either so no hope there.

Maybe I just haven't had decent fish and chips. Most chip shops near me now double as cheap Chinese takeaways. Most have shocking food hygiene ratings.

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I love chippy tea Fridays (called Fish and Chip Fridays in the article), fish and chips is probably my favourite meal, sometimes I have it with mushy peas and red sauce and sometimes I have it with curry sauce, I haven't been able to decide in the last 30 years or so of having it weekly which of these combinations is my favourite. Generally, I find coastal towns are better for fish and chips.

I like it when you have a cone of chips and the vinegar collects at the bottom of the cone, and you drink it after finishing your chips.

In high-school we would sneak out to the chippy at lunch and ask for a cone of chips in a tray, which meant we wanted a tray of chips but we only wanted to pay what we would normally pay for a cone of chips, the owner thought we were nobheads.

When I moved out for the first time, on Friday nights my flatmate and I would buy fish and chips, and beers, and watch Have I Got News For You together.

My life revolves around fish and chips.

Haha can tell you're northern. Shared appreciation for chippy tea. Chips rice and curry. Ah I'm hungry.

There's loads of awful fish and chip shops.

For the best fish and chips they should not be fried in vegetable oil. Any hard white fat is an improvement, with beef dripping the best. You'll get melt in the mouth crispness and wonderfully light feeling chips. If they fry hot enough.

It's rare to find a chipoll that still fries in dripping, but there are still some and will likely have a lengthy queue. Any chip shop that doubles as anything else is usually asking for trouble, unless it's an attached caf. :)

It does seem the quality of a restaurant is inversely proportional to the length of the menu. If I see a short menu I'll usually go straight in.

I'll keep that in mind! That's obviously where I've been going wrong.

Ah I fancy a chippy now.

You have clearly never had Yorkshire fish and chips.

I also note the author's ommission of mushy peas and a cup of tea, but then she isn't British, so overall a reasonable effort for a foreigner.

I've not! In Salford, you have to go out of your way to double check food hygiene ratings when you want to try a new chippy. Many are just a 1 or 2.

> You have clearly never had Yorkshire fish and chips.

From Yorkshire, lived in Yorkshire all my life and I'm entirely with him, at it's very best fish and chips is maybe just ok but it is rarely that.

I'll take a tuna steak and salad every time over that.

I had beautiful fish and chips in Whitby this year, less good ones in Settle, so Yorkshire can be variable too!

You can get a good chippy, or a bad one, anywhere in Britain. Our best local is run by a cheery Cypriot chap, in fact there are quite a lot of Cypriot chippys... but that is another story for the Atlas.

> "I had beautiful fish and chips in Whitby"

Funny you should mention Whitby, that little town was on my mind the whole time whilst reading these comments. I happened to pass through there maybe 25 years ago and the fish & chips were absolutely divine. Even today, when I think about good fish & chips, I think about Whitby.

Is there something special about that town? Is fish & chips their thing?

They are pretty well known for their fish and chips, yes.

In no particular order, Whitby is famous for

1) Jet. A black stone. Fossilized Monkey Puzzle sap. Popular for jewellery in Victorian times with the fashion for having a dead husband. 2) Fish and Chips. Although not really any better than any other seaside town. 3) Dracula landed there. 4) The Abbey, perhaps because of Dracula 5) Whale bone arch 6) Captain Cook

Pretty at some angles. Typical UK seaside of shitty amusement arcades and shops selling junk made out of shells from China from other angles.

Worth a day trip. I think most visitors go away remembering the steps...

Same as for the other fishing ports.

Fish in Whitby should be fresh off the boat. There may not be as many trawlers as in the past, but enough to get good fish.

The Magpie in Whitby has to be our favourite fish and chip shop, I knew it would be good the first time we went there as the queue to get in was huge.

I do remember a time when I enjoyed fish and chips. The place was called Stav's, ran by a Greek guy called Stavros. Decent kebabs too. Unfortunately folded and converted into a Chinese takeaway.

Make it yourself at home. Triple cook the chips and they'll be far from bland. Make your own tartar sauce. Beer batter some fish you've bought yourself.

Crap chippy food is awful and just puts you in a coma, it's not the fault of the dish.

Single cooked chips with blisteringly hot dripping in the deep fryer is my approach. Crispness that melts on the outside, and fluffy like the finest roasties on the inside. Agree with you on the rest. :)

That sounds amazing. Love me t roasties. Amazing in duck fat too.

Exactly. Triple cooked chips are heaven. In between stages I just leave them on a rack in the garden as they need to dry out properly.

'Most chip shops near me now double as cheap Chinese takeaways'

There's your answer.

Not surprising, the concept in itself is gross. As far as I understand, french fries are horribly unhealthy to begin with, and they're topping it up with fried fish. Why not sprinkle it with sugar that's been soaking in oil overnight, don't just stop there, come on!

I understand this article conveys the historical aspect of the dish, which I respect.

Which country are you in? Had fish and chips last night, very good - in Australia.

I always find it amusing how much the fish and chips is lauded in the UK when most of it is terrible compared to NZ/Aus. The fish is tasteless, the chips are (generally) cooked in too low a temperature oil leaving them stodgy. Add to this that the fish requires the skin leaving on the fillet for most kinds so the whole thing can hold together, etc.

Haddock's about the most flavoursome of the UK fish available from a chippy, but when you compare it to Hoki (pretty much the cheapest NZ fish), Gurnard, or Snapper, there's no contest.

Different tastes... as a Brit if I went to a chippy and the chips weren't a bit stodgy I would send them back. I ordered chips, not fries :-)

I do agree with you a bit on the fish though, as I understand a lot of this is to do with fishing quotas which push the prices up so most places use cheaper fish. Ifou go to a good chippy in a seaside town, and specifically order cod or hadock, then you can get something good. As others have said the quality of restaurants really vary, even in the same town.

I don't think the taste of the fish is necessarily quota-based, more to do with water temperature. Cold water fish are either "tasteless" (like cod, haddock, etc.) or oily (like herring and similar).

As for chips, I think we'll have to agree to disagree there. :)

100% agreed. Having lived in Ireland for years, and continuously visiting England for work, the best fish and chips I had was in OZ. NZ was meh but maybe I was just unlucky.

I'm in the UK. I don't think they use cod or anything like that. They just call it battered fish because it's not cod or haddock.

With some of the better examples you have the choice of one or either. In less good establishments it tends to be just 'fish' though.

Are you sure? Here in the US they've given up naming fish, because the supply chain has diluted everything with trash whitefish, which they re-branded 'tilapia' to make it sound like its a thing. No flavor at all.

The local restaurant chain relabeled their 'fried catfish' as 'fried whitefish' or something. Asked why they changed their fish. They said "We didn't change the fish; we just changed the menu". Presumably because it wasn't catfish all along.

I'll have to visit my hometown. Apparently there's now a chippy that does just that. Choice of cod, haddock and plaice if I recall. Some old friends rave about it.

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