United Chip, 5 Clerkenwell Road, London EC1M 5PE (020 7490 0069). Meal for two, excluding drinks: £25 (at most)
United Chip may be the bravest restaurant opening in years. Sure, you can open an izakaya or a ceviche place, something niche with a dreadful concept, and a few people will have an opinion on that. Some will consider themselves experts. But open a chippy? Suddenly, the ranks of those standing in judgment upon you will stretch away to the vanishing point, like the court in A Matter of Life and Death. (You haven’t seen it? You really must.) We all have an opinion on what makes a good chippy. We are all of us alert to pretentiousness or, worse still, to a belief that the wheel has been reinvented. The wheel is perfectly fine as it is, thanks.
As someone once honoured with the noble task of presenting the National Fish and Chip Shop awards – I polished my shoes, and dabbed dripping behind my ears – I am well aware that trying to portray the sector as a homogeneous entity is a dreadful mistake. You’ll get shouted at by some quite fearsome types. You try carrying a 25kg sack of potatoes five times daily and see what it does to your shoulders. There are old-school chippies with steamy windows, run by sturdy women who know how to handle a brace of drunks on a Friday night, and there are new-style chippies that can speak fluent sustainability. There are crap ones that can’t be bothered to leave the frozen chips in the deep fat fryer for long enough, and terrific ones that favour a triple cook and can perv over potato starch content.
United Chip stands out for attending to practically every modern bell and whistle it can find, while still caring about the essentials. They have pickled onions on the counter – very good, crunchy, mouth-puckering ones – alongside pickled eggs. But there are also pots of “Bangkok mayonnaise” to dip and dredge through, and shakers on each table containing ground-down kelp for a seaweed umami hit or finely ground cayenne for those with something to prove. There are two vinegars – malt and white wine. They also have a short wine list, if you really wanted to, you outrageous bourgeois fop.
Their mission statement is clear. They use sustainable, line-caught fish. Every single piece of packaging is recyclable. Even their sunflower oil – cleaner tasting, vegetarian friendly, doesn’t make you smell of rendered cow – gets turned into bio-fuel when they’re done. Yes, the chef may be Sardinian, but be in no doubt: this is a British chippy. On one of those recent snowy days when the country had ground to a complete halt – this was meant to be an out-of-town review, but Network Rail had other ideas; trust me, I’ll be on the road again soon enough – the shop in Clerkenwell, central London, was doing a roaring trade from those looking for something to sustain them through the Arctic blast. There are fixed high tables and fixed stools and wipe-down surfaces, all in pleasing pastel colours.
There are three kinds of fish – cod, haddock and pollock – in three sizes, alongside two types of fried potato: chips or “frites”, the latter being the same as the former, only thinner cut. Here’s what you need to know. They are proper chips, fried to crisp in a manner that results in lots of golden, shattered bits at the bottom. They’re not as good as those at Parsons a couple of weeks back – few could be – but they’re really not far off. We try the cod and the pollock, and both come in an unimprovable golden, glassy batter inside which the fish has steamed to thick, pearly, shiny flakes. A small pollock including chips is £6.50, rising to £12.50 for something so large it will escape the cardboard box. The cod is a quid more at every size. Is this more than fish and chips will cost you in, say, Burnley? Yes, but not by much and to state the bloody obvious you’re not in bloody Burnley.
Their fish-finger sandwich comes in a glazed bun that does not fall apart in your hands, and is generously stuffed with their own panko crumb-crusted goujons and a serious, hand-chopped tartare sauce. Even better is their spiced prawn burger with Bangkok mayo (available after 3pm; I pleaded), which is a bit like eating your way through a giant tord man pla Thai fishcake. This is a very good thing indeed. Most extraordinary of all is their battered sausage made with pork from Dingley Dell in Suffolk, the last word in piggy welfare and meat production. Mark Hayward, who runs Dingley Dell, is convinced British pork has been bred for leanness rather than flavour. This battered, generously spiced sausage, in its beer-batter overcoat, has a delightful balance of meat to fat.
It also looks obscene. There’s no point trying to craft an elegant euphemism. Some sausages are just taunting you with their shameless lurch into the phallic. This one is the full Mapplethorpe. For £7.50 including chips, it’s an awful lot of big meaty sausage. I’ll stop now.
If there is an issue, it’s with the hot sides. The mushy peas are profoundly savoury and sustaining but, to my taste, cooked down too far, so lack texture. Others may disagree. The curry sauce is a different matter entirely. I scoop some on to a chip and hesitate. I can taste roasted spices and fresh chilli. I can taste a bold garam masala with lots of cumin and coriander seed. It has depth and intent, which just goes on and on. It tastes of care.
In short, it’s far too bloody good. True chip-shop curry sauce is a culinary abomination made from hot water poured on to a powder, ground up in some chemical culinary hell, overseen by an evil food additive troll; it’s a gruesome, over-sweetened mouth-stripping slap in the face you can’t stop yourself liking. And here they are with their delightful, freshly made sauce. What in God’s name were they thinking? The same goes for their ripe onion gravy full of ribbons of onion and caramel, and savoury loveliness. Making brilliant sauces for their rather good chips like this is frankly an outrageous innovation.
United Chip has to do a small bunch of very familiar things very well indeed. With this repertoire there is absolutely nowhere to hide. It could have been a ludicrous overreach deserving of Olympic standard eye rolling. It could have been a disaster. Happily, it really isn’t.
Jay’s news bites
The original Old Salty’s on Glasgow’s Argyll Street is gone now, but it lives on 25 minutes’ walk away on Byres Road. The mission remains the same: to celebrate the chip supper. Fish and chips start from £8.95 for hake to £10.45 for haddock and all the sides – gravy, mushy peas, pickled eggs – are present and correct alongside a full Scottish breakfast for £6.05 (oldsaltys.co.uk).
Eataly, the high-end Italian produce store-cum-food court, a stop on every foodie’s New York tour, has announced it will open a London outpost, away from classic retail spots on Bishopsgate in the City. It will be a massive 42,000sqft, but you’ll have to wait. It won’t open until 2020.
Who said high-end dining was dead? Chef Simon Martin, who has spent two years at Noma in Copenhagen, is to open a new restaurant in Manchester, Mana. He told the Manchester Evening News that it would be for: ‘Thirty people for dinner only, four days a week’ and serve tasting menus of ‘between 10 or 15 courses’.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
