Fish And Chips appears as a signature dish in 2 United Kingdom cities. See each city's local variant and where to eat it.
Fish and chips · Edinburgh
Battered haddock with thick-cut chips, salt and malt vinegar. Edinburgh's chippy default is haddock not cod, and the Old Town counters serve it through the small hours.
Fish and chips became an Edinburgh fixture in the late nineteenth century when the rail link to Aberdeen put boxed white fish in the city overnight. Haddock, not cod, became the Scottish default and remains so; The Tailend on Albert Place and L'Alba D'Oro on Henderson Row have served the same fish for decades. The Edinburgh chippy plates the chips first, the fish on top, with salt and brown sauce or vinegar at the customer's choice. The deep-fried Mars bar (Stonehaven, 1995) is not from Edinburgh but appears on every Royal Mile late-night menu as souvenir.
Where to eat in Edinburgh:
- Ondine
- Fishers in the City
- Bertie's Proper Fish and Chips
- L'Alba D'Oro
Fish and chips · London
Battered white fish (cod or haddock) deep-fried with thick-cut chips, salt, malt vinegar and mushy peas. The defining British take-away dish, eaten in London since the 1860s.
Fried fish came to London with Sephardic Jewish settlers in the seventeenth century. Joseph Malin opened the first identifiable combined fish-and-chip shop in 1860 in Bow, east London, pairing the Jewish fried-fish tradition with the northern chipped potato. By 1910 there were 25,000 chip shops in Britain; London's surviving institutions include The Golden Hind on Marylebone Lane (1914), Poppies (Camden, Spitalfields, Soho) and the Sea Shell of Lisson Grove. The Friday-night fish-and-chips habit owes to Catholic and traditional working-class fasting customs that the chippy slotted into perfectly.
Where to eat in London:
- J Sheekey
- Wright Brothers Borough