The Katsuification of Britain | Hacker News Reader

The Katsuification of Britain

vittlesmagazine.com

111 pointscolinprince98 comments

Long-time resident of Japan here. This article was a revelation; I had no idea that the humble katsu curry is now so common in the U.K.

A similar phenomenon of culinary appropriation and adaptation might be the Nepali-run Indian restaurants in Japan. In the past twenty years or so, they have spread to nearly every corner of the country. Though independently owned and run, they have largely similar menus, with food that, I've read, would seem out of place in both Nepal and India.

A recent book in Japanese [1] does a good job of tracing their origins and their role in giving immigration and employment opportunities to Nepalis.

[1] https://shinsho.shueisha.co.jp/kikan/1208-n/

Addendum: After I posted the above, I counted in my head the number of Nepali/Indian restaurants within a twenty-minute walk of my home in Yokohama and came up with six (I’ve eaten at all of them). It turns out that there are several more. Here’s a map of my neighborhood with them marked:

https://www.gally.net/temp/20240823_Indian_Nepali_restaurant...

If anyone wants to see what they look like on Google Street View or search for others, here’s a link:

https://www.google.com/maps/search/%E3%82%A4%E3%83%B3%E3%83%...

Probably none of them have katsu curry on the menu, though I have been to a few Nepali/Indian restaurants in Japan that did serve it—no doubt to appeal to less-adventurous Japanese tastes.

It’s pretty “popular” in United States also, well at least in my group of peers whenever we’re going for sushi one of us will have ordered katsu curry.

My absolute favorite is the curry as it’s made by Yayume sushi in San Ramon.

That's interesting. In Japan, you might have a hard time finding a place that serves both sushi and katsu curry. Restaurants tend to specialize.

I suspect it's because in the US, it all gets lumped together under the "Japanese food" category. I suspect the dishes being foreign in origin makes people less likely to consider them as separate categories.

I can confirm that I have the same thing in my part of the US though. A lot of restaurants will offer sushi and ramen both on the menu, with some other dishes like katsu curry showing up here and there. I would say the best sushi/ramen places here do specialize (just like you said about Japan), but it's pretty common to see places which don't.

They specialize here too, but midrange sushi spots always have a section of the menu catering to the one family member who hates sushi.

Is this unique to certain genres? Everyone in the UK knows about "Chinese takeaway chips" and "Indian Omlettes", but you don't see such concessions in Thai, Italian, French etc. places.

I can only speak to Japanese places in the US.

Quite a few people in the US have an aversion to eating raw meat, including sushi. Any mid range restaurant is going to offer more than just sushi so that there's something for everyone when a group wants to go out to eat.

Always love to shock US-Americans with the fact that we eat raw pork in Germany (google mettigel)

Heh, it probably would have been more shocking a generation or two ago. My mom liked to joke that her mom would overcook pork chops so badly that they would shatter if you dropped them. She was terrified of trichinosis, probably at least partially justifiably so.

In fact, I'd never even heard of eating pork as anything other than well-done until I saw Gordon Ramsay cook a pork chop medium rare.

Here in Sweden, I've seen some restaurants (I can't speak to the frequency of it) having cooked fish in some of the choices.

Sure, in america you might have a hard time finding a restaurant that serves both cheese burgers and american style spaghetti w/ meatballs. But when abroad you might find an 'american restaurant' that has both on their menu.

I think it's just down to people starting a 'foreign restaurant', there may just not be enough market for a specialty foreign food so you pack in a few popular dishes together and run a 'foreign country restaurant' instead of just a specialty place.

Certainly even in my corner of america (the pnw) where sushi is quite popular, we have a mix of places that just do sushi, or most do sushi and a few other dishes, or just a 'japanese restaurant'.

The cheesecake factory, amongst other chains.

Sure, and in japan you might find the japanese equivalent. The basic argument was though that you find these ultra specialized places mostly within the country of the foods origin and that they are more common than more broad places. Which I think is a worldwide trueism.

Almost without exception, restaurants in the US that specializes in fish will have non-fish options, because there's a sizeable minority that will not eat fish at all (or at least anything still recognizable as fish).

It’s very common in Portland, OR — I had pork katsu this week at a Hawaiian place. Curry less so, but plenty of non-sushi Japanese restaurants around.

Pretty much all non-Japanese food in Japan is some form of “cultural appropriation” to the extent that it plays into stereotypes/tropes Japanese people expect from that given “cuisine”. For example, Italian would consist of lots of cheese. Japanese “Italian” food is in a category of its own. In this case, it would be actual appropriation because it’s made by Japanese people rather than the given ethnic minority putting a spin on their cuisine. Best comment I’ve ever read on Reddit is that the Japanese don’t like cheese, they like the concept of cheese. Japanese people can’t stand strong smells nor spice, so that already greatly restricts the authenticity of food.

The exception would be if the restaurant is catering specifically or exclusively to the immigrant population. I’ve found this to be common in Vietnamese restaurants where it’s just a community hangout spot for the migrant workers.

Since you live in Yokohama, the entire town plays on stereotypes and tropes of what Japanese think of Chinese. Namely, all the fortune teller shops since the Japanese think Chinese people are mystical (the Western version is fortune telling machines feature an automata wearing a Turban or Gypsies).

Thanks for the response. I mostly agree with you about the food, but not about Yokohama. Chinatown is a tiny, atypical part of Yokohama; the vast majority of the city, including where I live, has nothing to do with stereotypes of Chinese. Also, Japanese views of China and of Chinese people are, for better or worse, diverse and complex, and mysticalness and fortune-telling play little to no role for most people.

I was in Japan the past two weeks and coming from NYC I wanted to try some pizza. So while in Sapporo I tried pizza at the Kirin beer garden (maybe Sapporo? I was drunk) and was disappointed. The cheese was a small pat in each quadrant and bland, similar to polly-o, the sauce lacked flavor which tasted like jar sauce, and the crust was under cooked. Then in Tokyo wandering the Ueno shopping district I found a small Italian joint that also had pizza. Same issues as my experience in Sapporo but the dough was almost uncooked in the center.

I will say they got the look of pizza down but none of the flavor and texture is all wrong. Feels more like a quick and dirty homemade pizza using cheap canned super market ingredients. Maybe they need a fat guy named Sal from Queens to lend a hand. Maybe they just dont like the flavor or texture of proper pizza.

Congrats, you learned what it’s like to live in Japan and be eternally disappointed with pizza. Swap burritos and the same experience mostly fits.

Was one of the more annoying parts of living there. You’d often have a place open, they’d get it “right”, then it either closes or they slowly change the food to fit the Japanese palette over time and the dish becomes a weird mirage.

There are a few exceptions - but that’s few and far between.

I suppose the stronger garlic and onion flavors along with oregano isn't appealing to the Japanese pallet.

I had lasagna in Sri Lanka once and had an similar experience. Looked like it, tasted nothing like it.

It's like the only thing they had to go on was a picture of what lasagna looks like.

> Pretty much all non-Japanese food in Japan is some form of “cultural appropriation”

Pretty much all food everywhere is cultural appropriated to some degree--authenticity when it comes to cuisine is essentially a meaningless term.

It is mostly a kid's food in Japan. When we lived there our kids loved Japanese curry. Now that we are back in the US, we can get it from Amazon. The kids are a lot older, but they still love it.

https://www.amazon.com/Golden-Curry-Sauce-Mild-Ounce/dp/B07B...

Would you recommend any of these as "must try"? (I'm going to be in Yokohama in October for the YIS centennial anniversary.)

>The katsu curry craze is a specifically British phenomenon; it isn’t derived from a larger international trend. American supermarket shelves are not laden with katsu curry products.

I can think of a few grocery stores here that have "Katsu Curry" at the to-go section - definitely not the finest example of the art, but still pretty good. It has been pretty popular in San Francisco for a long time. Although, the post-pandemic era, I've definitely noticed a large uptick in places that serve it. I can think of a few reasons why that is, due to SF's history and culture. I have very fond memories of my last job circa 2015 or so: waiting in line for Muraccis on Kearny.

It doesn't seem anything like what's going on in the UK at the moment, though. I hope that larger trend takes hold here, it really is one of my favorite comfort foods. Golden Curry is a staple in my home.

Also, I've not often seen it called Katsu Curry in the US. That is definitely a name that would be considered accurate, but more common I've heard might be "Japanese Curry" (an important distinction) or "curry rice". It is definitely the same food, though.

SF is probably the city with the strongest Japanese influence in the continental US though. Idk if your observations would hold in Houston, Chicago, or Miami.

> I can think of a few reasons why that is, due to SF's history and culture.

Yeah, you'll find it in Hawaii or New York as well

Hawaii or Seattle arguably have a larger Japanese influence.

Seattle as of late has priced so many places out to the point where I have Japanese friends here who disagree on this point. I was surprised to hear it but the more I look around the more I can kind of see it.

Regionally yes, there’s influence and history - but Seattle doesn’t do enough to protect subcultures.

From the article, what is available in SF is nothing like the phenom in the UK. It's not the fast-food stuff or the Japanese restaurants --it's a spice/flavor added to everything, soon coming to soda pop.

I think it's more like if the Korean BBQ stuff were 100x what it is in the US plus the halapeno flavor sprinkled on everything --or, in other parts if the US dill-pickle flavoring on things.

In essence they out katsu-curry the Japanese in Japan because in Japan they have many more flavors to pick from, so aren't stuck on one.

Or the Korean taco? chef's kiss

> It doesn't seem anything like what's going on in the UK at the moment, though.

Yeah, it's definitely crazy there.

In America, we have to go to Japan to import our Vermont Curry!

though, the Torokeru and Kokumaro are in some quarters considered better, with Java the spiciest, Vermont the sweetest, and Golden the least remarkable

https://www.seriouseats.com/taste-test-japanese-curry-roux-m...

In NZ pretty much every supermarket has Golden (a lot of them even have okonomi sauce). I have to stock up on Vermont in Japan marts tho.

Premade S&B pouches is awesome camping/boating hack. It lasts ages and all you need to do is warm it up for few mins.

My favourite recent “discovery” (even if I visited Japan 4 times) is tonkatsu.

Fwiw I've seen vermont curry in my local grocery.

Also if one lives near an H-Mart, they have it as well.

all i meant was, in those cases it has been imported from Japan and when I said go to Japan to get it I was referring it was not imported from the State of Vermont in the US

I don't think it's fair to say that Katsu is particularly a British fad. When I lived in London, we'd go to the Japan Centre, or a local Japanese takeaway that had much better sauce but less generous meat portions. But these were pretty much the only 2 options within about 10 minutes walk from Piccadilly.

Last time I was in Hong Kong, I stayed in a hotel near Yau Ma Tei station. There were probably 5 or 6 Japanese fast-food restaurants mostly focussed on Katsu curry dishes within a few blocks walk down Nathan Road towards Mong Kok. Despite loving Chinese food, I actually had Katsu curry 3 nights in a row, it was so good there!

I thought that as a heritage of the British Raj, that curry was already much more popular in the UK than in Europe or America. So I'd expect any variations to catch on faster in the UK.

There are two different British curry traditions. The oldest is Anglo-Indian cuisine, which did originate with the British Raj. This is the one that inspired Japanese curry, because it was served on British Navy ships and the Imperial Japanese Navy copied them. Anglo-Indian cuisine includes things like coronation chicken and the curry sauce served at fish-and-chip shops.

The newer tradition is British Indian Restaurant cuisine, which is mostly based on Bangladeshi cuisine adapted to British tastes by Bangladeshi immigrants. It's called "Indian" for marketing purposes. British Indian Restaurant cuisine is what most British people will think of if you just say "curry". Unlike Anglo-Indian and Japanese curry, it is not thickened with roux, instead using pureed onions as the main thickener. This is the one that includes chicken tikka masala.

Where did the "long naan" come from?

I'm a little confused by your comment

For me are three distinct things

Japanese curry Japanese style of the Indian dish often made from an instant roux package and usually served over Japanese style white rice

Katsu Curry the same dish with a deep fried pork or chicken cutlet put on the the rice before the curry is poured over

Curry rice - no cutlet, the curry is mixed in with the rice before it's served.

So we can see katsu curry as an example of the Pizza Effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza_effect

'Katsu' is short for Katsudon, which is short for Tonkatsu (pork cutlet) Donburi (rice dish). If there's no pork cutlet it's not Katsu. The curry is just 'kare'.

If you haven't had a Japanese curry in Japan, and you didn't make it from scratch, whatever you get will be a poor imitation. Real Japanese curry tastes both fresh, simple, vegetal and clean, and artificial, at the same time.

If you care deeply about food and you haven't been to Japan, I can't recommend it enough. As a tourist I've never been anywhere else that's so easy to have a great meal. It used to be dirt cheap to fly there if you booked in advance, but I guess inflation and time has upped the price a bit.

(cheapest east coast round-trip is JFK-NRT @ $709, with Alaskan & JAL. if you want more bang for your buck, check Skiplagged; for $823 you can spend 14 hours in Atlanta and 23 hours in Vancouver, or for $1,100 spend 21 hours in Istanbul, or 23 hours in Seoul, or for $1,231 spend 21 hours in Honolulu, or for $1,334 spend 23 hours in Honolulu and 20 hours in Osaka)

Word.

> 'Katsu' is short for Katsudon

Don't you mean short for katsuretsu (カツレツ), katakana for cutlet as adopted from the French?

> If you haven't had a Japanese curry in Japan, and you didn't make it from scratch, whatever you get will be a poor imitation. Real Japanese curry tastes both fresh, simple, vegetal and clean, and artificial, at the same time.

Meh. There are tons of diasporas across the world that would beg to differ; at the end of the day, it's inexpensive comfort food to this demographic.

Personally, I'm more picky with the panko and quality of pork. It's easy to mask imperfection with curry, and almost as easy to make something distinctly tasty on the cheap.

>'Katsu' is short for Katsudon

katsu is cutlet, tonkatsu is pork cutlet

katsu is short for katsuretsu, which shows every sign of being transliterated from English "cutlet" and especially pleasureable, the two "su"s are this guy ツ

I stand corrected, thank you. I'm an idiot because Katsudon is a completely different dish (and I've made both dishes tons).

> If there's no pork cutlet it's not Katsu. The curry is just 'kare'.

I used to push back hard on this and get annoyed with it, words have meanings let's use them correctly!

But over time I've changed my opinion. In Japan Katsu may mean something specific, but in the UK it means something different. That's language evolving, and that's a natural process. Pushing back on language changing in normal ways isn't going to achieve anything, it's an uphill battle, and it results in less clear communication because it often involves ignoring who the target audience is and treating them like another audience.

By all means correct someone who is using a word incorrectly, but trying to correct a language because it's different to the previous iteration is a lost battle.

(No comment on the food reviews though, you're absolutely right that the "real stuff" is far better.)

The problem with that is then in a hundred years old books are hard to understand. And in several hundred they’re basically incomprehensible. However for history zero there’s nothing quite like rigid descriptivism!

My problem is just that -- I go to a place; I want a katsu (cutlet) set, and all they have is katsu-don, and I'm like, "I didn't want the rice bowl with the curry sauce; I wanted the schnitzel with the A1 sauce", but people are calling both "katsu". That's my only beef. Or pork, I guess.

Well but that's like going to Poland and asking for schnitzel, if you're used to German schnitzels you're not going the thing you expect. And it's not the people making it who are wrong, it's just that the word means a different thing there.

Nah, I meant the Japanese style katsu. There's "katsu", aka cutlet, and it's basically a Japanese style schnitzel (I use the German word only for humor and to emphasize the cross-cultural nature of this food). It's traditionally served with raw cabbage, maybe pickled vegetables, and usually a thick Japanese sauce that is a distant relative of Worcestershire sauce; it's a lot like A1 steak sauce. And then there's katsu-don, which is same cutlet served atop rice in a bowl (hence the -"don"), now generally with more of a Japanese-curry sauce. But alas the latter dish seems to be outstripping the former in popularity, to the point that one cannot be sure that "katsu" without "-don" is being used to refer to the former!

On second reading, I probably misunderstood you. I think you mean that "katsu" just means something else in the UK. Which -- I guess it does. Drats! Sapir-Whorf has robbed me of a dish.

I don't even think that this falls into the normal "language evolves" fights, honestly. Katsu can be a word that means one thing in Japanese and another thing in English without any confusion in meaning. One expects that different languages will express things differently, after all. This isn't really in the same ballpark as English-speaking people misusing English words.

Food does this all the time as it moves between cultures.

Look at what in the US today is called a macaroon, a macaron, and some macaroni. Which one of those is closer to the ‘original’ Italian culinary meaning of maccherone?

I'm not a curry connoisseur, so might be missing some nuance, but it's the one food that I thought was actually decent outside Japan. I thought the katsu in Korea, Taiwan, and China were all good enough, and always liked Muracci's in SF.

If I'm in Japan for a week it's all sushi, ramen, soba, and yakiniku. There's no time for curry!

Eh, I lived in Japan for 2 years, and I don't rate the curry there that highly. You can find good curry, sure, and I have my favourite places, but the baseline isn't that high. People forget Japan has basically been in a recession or depression for literally 30 years. When I think of mainstream food there, what I usually think of is "made down to a price".

I'm gonna stake a claim and say that if you go and buy a pack of golden curry medium, cut up a decent bit of rump steak, add a couple of carrots, potatoes and onions, boil the shit out of all that then mix in the curry, serve on fresh cooked rice with a handful of shredded cheddar - you're having a pretty damn good curry which will be hard to beat no matter where you go.

I'll also go out on a limb and claim that the baseline Japanese cuisine in cities with a decent size diaspora - think LA, Sydney, Bangkok - is better than in Tokyo. You have enough locals to support a lot of restaurants, and they enforce an authentic taste because they know what it should taste like, and they have more money. Your average plate will cost more, but everything in it, and the final result, is better quality.

Maybe nowadays the authentic restaurants might be more expensive, but I think historically it's been the other way round. The authentic restaurants were cheaper and opened to support the local immigrant population who wanted they tastes they were familiar with and missed from home, but the more expensive restaurants had the foods adapted to the local tastes so that they'd appeal to a wider range of people.

If you look at Chinese restaurants in the UK, the older ones have radically different menus to the newer ones that cater primarily to Chinese students. The former is mostly based on Cantonese cuisine, but changed significantly to what Westerners expect, the latter is from all over China and usually pretty authentic.

“Authentic” katsu curry is made from S&B Oriental Curry powder and an handful of ingredients (garlic, ginger, stock, etc…) And just buying S&B Golden curry is pretty good, better than some places in SF even.

Of course, everything tastes better after a 12 hours on a plane.

My favorite is volcano curry in SF. My go-to was pork with calamari but the stopped the calamari at some point. They have fried oysters though so I throw those on.

The most annoying thing about good katsu is when the cutlet is obviously unsalted.

My Japanese in Japan friend says the S&B is legit. I get it online and then just toss whatever in the pot with it. Great way to use up extra vegetables plus whatever meat you have handy.

Nit-pick: katsudon is katsu served on rice, usually with some condiments or vegetables. The -don suffix is the rice bowl.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time trying different katsu curries in Japan and abroad and there are absolutely great katsu curries outside Japan. A little different, usually lacking a sweetness, but that’s more to target local palettes. Though I agree that the shop roux is a major disappointment.

I'm so happy they mention "chip shop curry sauce".

My current favourite katsu place is Kokoro in Liverpool. Always hits the spot.

Chinese take away chips and curry sauce. Chips come in a brown paper bag, curry sauce used to come in a polystyrene cup.

Not to diminish your comment about Kokoro, but it is a chain of over 50 locations unless the Liverpool location has anything unique about it.

However it is most excellent.

It's my local, so that makes it unique. It does have a quieter vibe than some of the other branches I've been in. YMMV

Make it at home!

https://tradewindsorientalshop.co.uk/products/maykway-mild-c...

I only go when I'm passing, once every month or so. Special meal out, isn't it.

I live in Britain and this katsuification phenomenon has totally passed me by. Indian curry, not so much.

Yeah. I've seen it in Wagamamas and other places that serve Japanese-inspired food but not noticed it in many other places.

My bet of next big thing is malaysian curry.

I sincerely hope so. Possibly my favourite lunch in the world can be had at Malaysian Laksa House (formerly Coconut House) on Elizabeth street in Melbourne. Their laksa is mind blowing.

It has passed me by as well. I've been living in one of the largest cities for my entire life and have never batted an eye. There's just as much of every other cuisine as there is katsu curry.

I could probably make a 'The x-ification of Britain' for quite a lot of food items. Majority of brits in the comments echoing the sentiment.

Also, that site should probably do something about the botted comments?

Just checked, and sure enough our (IKEA) GB stores have a katsu curry on the menu: https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/food/salesareas/restaurant/99dedb...

The food at those IKEA stores has gone so so bad. It used to be pleasant but last couple of times I’ve been they’ve got rid of the cream meatball sauce and replaced it with thin, school dinner type gravy. It was awful, not even close to being the same experience.

I hadn't noticed the katsu curry everywhere thing, but that's probably because I don't eat junk food. I have made it myself. It's not bad as a novelty, mostly because of the breaded protein (tofu in my case). But the gravy is not very exciting if you like Indian food at all.

So I was about to dismiss the article but the really interesting part is further down. Katsu curry is really British anyway! This makes sense when you think about it a bit. The British nicked all the delicious food from Indian at a time when British food was "boil vegetables for an hour, discard the veg and drink the water". That's where things like HP sauce, pickles, chutneys etc come from and, of course, "curry powder". There's no such thing as curry powder in India (confusingly there's the unrelated curry leaves). It was just anglicised Indian flavours. Of course they would make a starch thickened sauce with it...

London resident not eating junk food either, and indeed I hadn't really noticed the "phenomenon".

If anything I've seen the fried chicken with panko much more than the katsu curry sauce.

I just got back from my first trip to the UK, and I made sure to try a pub curry while I was there. I knew a bit about the colonial history, but I now understand why that food was so unlike any Indian curry I'd ever had and so similar to Japanese curry. Fascinating stuff.

I was under the impression Japanese curry as we know it today was born in the US, as a way of using bruised/soft vegetables or something.

There are far superior forms of "katsu" out there, the greatest being the chicken Katsudon or chicken Katsu egg don.

I'll fight anyone that disagrees.

Japanese curry, is curry from India that was adopted by the British and then the Japanese adopted the British curry.

And it is namely British Naval curry. As served on naval ships. Which itself is rather far from what is currently served on the land of Britain...

We agree that katsudon is better, but we'll never see eye to eye if you prefer chicken over pork katsu...

I saw a Katsu bake in Greggs this morning....in Greggs....

No, not particularly. What I find amusing about Katsu is it reminds of the 1970s curry in a packet type of meal for example https://nostalgiacentral.com/pop-culture/food-drink/vesta-cu.... Also school dinners where a curry sauce would have a random sultana and a bit of carrot in it. Wonderfully disgusting.

Certainly chicken is increasingly popular, fish and chips is almost a boutique food these days since fish is expensive and also very easy to make badly. Whereas chicken is cheaper and easier https://archive.is/Mu1DL

I think we can all admit that chip (aka crisp) flavors have jumped the shark and are no longer representative of any trend other than random mashings from a crayon box of flavors trickling out of the industrial flavor chemical factory.

E.g. https://www.publix.com/pd/publix-potato-chips-kettle-cooked-... (one of the things pictured is in the bag; the other is not)

> one of the things pictured is in the bag; the other is not

Do you also believe that gerber should remove pictures of cute babies from their baby food bottles?

Are you meant to feed the potato chips to a serving of baby back ribs?

On the other hand, Japanese Kit Kat flavours are amazingly realistic

Wow, a site about potato chips that is region-blocked so that I don't become a web serving cost without being able to buy their product, I guess. Wow.

Almost certainly done to avoid the cost of regulatory compliance.

There are a lot of words for crunchy potato slices, and people get very angry about which...

Which IMHO is a great thing (not getting anything from the link, but filing the blanks from your comment)

That means surprising flavours get a chance to be tested on the open, instead of the heavier gatekeeping happening until now.

We got pea based crisps, that seemed ridiculous at first, but it was incredible.

We also got blueberry-gum flavoured crisps. Saving you the trouble: They are less incredible. I still agree it's worth it!

Diet Orange Vanilla Coke tasted exactly like licking a shag carpet.

Brit here. I have to object to “chip (aka crisp)”. It’s a crisp. You may aka it as a chip, which is weird I suppose but you do you.

Two products. Both made from potato. One is texturally crisp. Let’s call that a ‘crisp’. The other one isn’t. Let’s call that a ‘chip’.

It’s worse here in Australia. They have to call chips ‘hot chips’ to differentiate them from crisps!

Insanity, people. There’s no logic here. We’re all rational people.

Crisps are crisp.

Chips are the other ones.

/replies locked by the admin

One might argue whether chips are actually small chunks of roughly cut (i.e. chipped from) potato, but crisps most definitely are not. Crisps are precisely sliced, quite thinly (and, as you point out, are crisp). Chips approximate chips.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com