Inn at the Sticks, Llansteffan

In an attempt to describe meals in sufficient detail (sufficient to try and convince people I know what I'm talking about, that is), it sometimes feels like I'm rather unfairly picking out every fault in a dish instead of letting the minor issues fly and focusing on the overall effect. The thing is, details are easy to explain, and faults doubly so, and so it's very easy to fall in that trap of being super analytical without really getting to the heart of whether a restaurant experience overall is good or bad.

I wouldn't really know to change this - old dog, new tricks and so on - or even if it's possible, but let me say this about Inn at the Sticks in Llansteffan before we go any further: we really enjoyed our evening at this friendly - and superbly popular - gastropub on the Camarthenshire coast, and for the prices they are charging I'd recommend it to basically anyone.

Right, it's time for the details, and actually this vast bowl of mussels got all the details right. The wine and butter broth was deep and satisfying, studded with shallots (I think) and fresh parsley, and the mussels themselves were plump and fresh tasting, free of grit and full of flavour. The three of us shared this single portion as a starter, and still struggled to finish our mains.

Bread, pleasant enough itself but served with a very nice soft salted butter, came draped with a few leaves of wilted salad. No, I don't know why either but these are details - who cares if they want to serve dry salad on bread, or chopped chives on butter, we just removed them and carried on. Easy. No harm done.

Main courses varied quite a bit in portion sizes so I'll take you from the smallest to the largest. First fish and chips, pretty modest and perhaps a tad over, but was still perfectly enjoyable and the chips - huge, crunchy things - were fantastic. I'm going to ignore what they did to the peas though, as life's too short.

Next, and another victim of the Sticks' compulsion to put salad on things, was chicken kiev, hiding under about a half a kilo of rocket and parmesan. Once I'd scraped the rocket off, I was treated to a huge slab of greaseless, crisp chicken breast, which oozed garlic butter as the breadcrumbed casing was broken into. For £10.50, no complaints. Well you know, some complaints but none that really matter.

King of the portion sizes was the catch of the day - hake - which arrived as two giant fillets, literally double what you might be forgiven for expecting for £14. They were utterly perfectly cooked, moist and buttery and firm, and with gorgeous dark, crisp skins that revealed themselves after we'd scraped off a mound of buttered parsley. Actually, the parsley was a lovely accompaniment and a decently judged portion, so I've no need to be mean about it.

And that was all we could manage. A great little unpretentious dinner in a pretty Camarthenshire town, and a very early one as high season and word of mouth had clearly had quite the effect on their bookings. We turned up at 5pm (the only available table), ate extremely well for about an hour and a half, then got back to our clifftop AirBnB in time for digestifs on the verandah. The total bill came to £22.65 each plus tip, which we were more than happy to add for service so enthusiastic it bordered on cultish, like being waited on by the cast of Book of Mormon.

So why sweat the details? If you can rock up at a joint like this with £22 in your pocket and a hankering for fresh fish and chunky chips and come away happy, who needs to know about superfluous salad or weird peas? Nobody, that's who, if at the end of the evening your body is brimming with joy and butter-induced heartburn. Sticks at the Inn is the pride of Llansteffan, and they should be very proud indeed.

7/10

United Chip, Clerkenwell

Being a fish and chip fan in London is hard, and you become wearily used to disappointment. Soggy old fish kept warm for too long in hot cabinets, batter too thick, batter too thin, chips too skinny, chips too fat, and the worst crime of all, the one truly unforgivable fish and chip violation, crushed minted garden peas instead of mushy peas. You're more likely than not to suffer one of the above list in your search for a decent fix in London, and the chances of you finding anything as good as even the most second-tier chippie up in Southport, or Blackpool, or Whitby, are pretty much nil.

So I was visiting United Chip more out of hope than expectation. I was also desperately trying to keep an open mind after a press release boasting an interior of "millennial pinks and soft greys... that linger in the memory" and of putting a "unique spin on a tired concept". Listen, mate, fish and chips is not a "tired concept". It's just that nobody south of Watford knows what the bloody hell they're doing with it. What we're waiting for isn't to match our dinner with craft beer in a "contemporary and vibrant" space but for someone - anyone - within Zone 6 to just do it properly for once.

How annoying, then, that United Chip turned out to be really rather good. Not the Swan Southport good, not Senior's Blackpool good, but good, and in London, quite frankly I'll take good. Yes, there are annoyances; the communal seating, the soundtrack of Morrissey's most recent "obnoxious dickhead" period, the fact that all the food is served in takeaway pizza boxes whether you're eating in or not. But they appear to know what makes good fish and chips, and how to achieve it, which puts them head and shoulders above most anywhere else in town.

It's also pretty good value. A "small" cod and chips is £7.50, and it really isn't that small at all. The fish was cooked perfectly, in a crisp, delicate batter and boasted lovely bright white, flaky flesh. Chips had a good crunch and were nice and soft inside, and despite being piled up inside a cardboard box managed to keep their texture 'till the last one was hoovered up. Doused in salt and malt vinegar, this was more than acceptable F&C work.

So, a "unique spin on a tired concept"? Not really. This was very solidly traditional fish and chips, done well, albeit served in a self-consciously "branded" room alongside craft beers and a selection of silly sauces. It won't be anyone's nirvana, least of all those lucky enough to pay regular visits up north, but it's guaranteed to be better than your local London pub's version, and possibly even cheaper, too. Oh, and the mushy peas? I'm afraid I didn't try them, but am assured they're proper, and don't involve garden peas or mint or crushed anything. And that alone gives me reason to return.

7/10

The Swan, Southport

Today I'm going to do something I have only ever done once before on this blog - re-review a restaurant. Unlike the other time I re-reviewed a place, however, this is not a panicky PR-led excursion on the back of a disastrous first visit. Nor is this even the chance to update a score following a dramatic change in quality or new direction. Quite the opposite; the subject in question has varied very little about the way it goes about things for at least as long as I've been alive, and probably well before that.

No, I'm re-reviewing the Swan, a fish and chip shop in Southport, for two reasons. Firstly, because it's brought me more joy over the years than almost anywhere else I can think of, and this post is an extended "thank you" for countless deeply brilliant dinners from as far back as I can remember. Secondly, and more importantly, it's because as many people as possible from around the world - and specifically London - need to sit down to a plate of haddock and chips at this Merseyside institution and discover exactly how badly wrong they themselves have been getting it so far.

Fish and chips is a simple concept: battered, deep-fried white fish, chips, marrowfat mushy peas. Malt vinegar and salt to finish, and perhaps some ground white pepper if you so wish. But let's not be confusing "simple" with "easy". There's a longish list of "do"s and "don't"s I could rattle off at this point but to save time (and eye-rolling from anyone from North of Watford who consider it all to be bleeding obvious anyway), here are the main irrefutable characteristics of fish & chips:

- Acceptable fish are cod, haddock or plaice. Add whiting or pollack or God knows what else to the menu if you must, but if at least one of cod, haddock or plaice aren't also available, you've fallen at the first hurdle.

- Mushy peas are marrowfat peas, not crushed garden peas, and certainly not minted. If you're very worried about the artifically dyed bright-green mushies, then you can use the less colourful undyed, but if you start dealing with garden peas you deserve to be a laughing stock.

- Chips, not wedges, and not fries. There is a correct size for fish & chip chips, thin enough to give a good bite while not making you feel you're tackling a Sunday roast, but not too thin to soak up too much salt & vinegar. And mess about all you like with beef dripping and triple-cooking by all means, but all I'll say is if the Swan make the best chips in Britain (which they do) using nothing more than vegetable oil, there's no excuse for anyone else reinventing the wheel.

Those are the basics, then, but needless to say there's plenty of room for manoeuvre here and using this simple formula it's still possible to get things badly wrong. Peas aside, for example, the Fish and Chip Shop in Islington did most things right on paper, but still somehow ended up with a ludicrous inflated balloon of pallid batter encasing a tragically overcooked mush of cod inside. And mess up your cooking temperatures and you run the risk of ending up with those horrid, soggy orange chips that make you feel ill just looking at them; cooking the perfect chips is a science all to itself.

For the masterclass, then, we must return to the Swan. Here the chips are never deep golden brown like what seems to be considered "correct" in fancy London restaurants; they are lighter, the larger ones with gentle give rather than an obvious crunch but (if you're lucky) still plenty of the smaller crunchy bits to chase around the plate or bag towards the end of your dinner. The mushy peas are earthy and rich, thick enough to pile up on a chip but not dry or claggy.

The fish itself, bright as the driven snow and with the kind of loose, defined flakes you get from timing the cooking just-so, is encased in a firm but remarkably thin batter that somehow (and there's always a touch of the black magic to the best chip shop fish) manages to retain its deep golden hue and snap right until the final mouthful. The cross-section here shows you just how thin the batter can be; if you have three inches of aggressively crunchy batter to drill through before you reach the fish, it displays a lack of confidence in your frying skills as well as a worrying attitude to your customers' long-term health.

In an ideal world, your friendly waitress would bring a plate of white bread and butter to use making chip butties. Also in an ideal world you'll be eating your food either out of a bag on the seafront or in a room largely unchanged since the 1980s populated by every cross-section of Southport society. You'll probably also want a wall studded with clippings from the local press, and a bill that never exceeds £10/head. In short, in an ideal world you will be eating fish and chips in the Swan, Southport. But hey, we can't all be that fortunate.

10/10

Berners Tavern, Fitzrovia

The first thing you notice about Berners Tavern, and the last thing, and in fact all you notice for much of what happens inbetween, is That Room. Part palace ballroom, part Paris Salon, this lavish space, with its lofty carved ceiling, three-story illuminated bar and walls appointed with a bewildering number and variety of framed paintings, photographs and mirrors, could easily be the most impressive in town. It's like eating in the Halls of Versaille.

Unsurprisingly, then, the food has a hard time living up to it all. Not that any of it is bad, it's just rather unambitious; at the best of times, a menu of smoked salmon & watercress, steak and chips, and venison with pickled cabbage is hardly likely to be burned indelibly into the memory, but in this fantastic space it seems doubly timid, a collection of crowdpleasing British clichés at expense-account prices, served to a crowd so dazzled by their surroundings they will hopefully somehow be convinced £20 for fish and chips is value.

OK, perhaps I'm being unfair. Most of the food was well executed and not all of it was wildly expensive. A starter, for example, of crispy lamb breast and pumpkin served with a side pan of pecorino fregola and lamb marrow crumble had loads going on for £8, some good hearty winter flavours and a pleasing to and fro of crunch and soft. "Egg, Ham and Peas" was less successful thanks to a strangely watery (in both senses - underflavoured and undercooked) egg, and the "mushy peas" were, needless to say, nothing of the sort, just bland crushed garden peas mixed with slightly too much mint. But it looked the part, and the crunchy slivers of ham were pleasant.

An inbetween course of scallop ceviche arrived next, and for the most part was welcome, though I think if I'd actually ordered it from the menu I would have been rather put out that the scallops were so lightly "ceviche"d that they tasted completely raw and slimy. There was a fantastic chilli and lime sorbet in the middle though which made up for it.

Mains were, in a similar vein to the starters, familiar but satisfying. Venison was politely pink and served with a little fondant potato and roast carrot as well as the aforementioned pickled cabbage (stop me if you need a chance to catch your breath after that radical pairing of ingredients). And a ribeye, missing the char you would have got from a charcoal grill but nevertheless timed well, was surprisingly good beef - "Devon Ruby Red" apparently. Oversized duck fat chips, peppercorn sauce (I could have specified Bearnaise, but not both - perhaps they were worried the excitement would have been too much for me), a little pot of green salad, all present and correct. We ate it all, and we did enjoy it, so you know, no real complaints. Just a bit... hotel brasserie.

All of which makes what happened next with the desserts even more of a surprise. They were, well, quite brilliant. Calvados and apple éclair had a good firm pastry encasing lovely fresh Devon cream, with a ever-so-subtle tang of alcohol and some rich slivers of poached apple. The salted caramel ice cream it came with was all kinds of great, a little icy bomb of flavour.

And "rhubarb and custard", new on the menu we were told, was that rarest of things - a fresh take on an old classic that wasn't just different for the sake of it. The rhubarb itself had an impressively strong, sweet flavour - perhaps they were those ones forced to grow in the dark at the bidding of their cruel rhubarb masters. And studded amongst the smooth vanilla custard were these little nuggets of salty cake of some kind. Flapjack? Brownie? All I can tell you that it worked really well; our waiter asked for feedback and all I could suggest was not to change a thing.

So yes, desserts were worth the journey and then some. And service couldn't be faulted either - dishes arrived at a perfect pace and all the staff were as impressive and well-turned-out as their surroundings. But after all said and done, with a solid but unspectacular starter and main course each and a couple of sides, and even despite the lovely desserts (only one of which appeared on the bill), the total still came to £111. With no alcohol. And I'm sorry but that's a lot, no matter how nice the view is.

6/10

The Fish and Chip Shop, Islington

The cliché is that you can't get decent fish and chips in London. This is, of course, nonsense - Masters Superfish in Waterloo is very good, as is the Golden Hind in Marylebone, and Kerbisher & Malt in Kensington, and I'm told that Poppies (Spitalfields and Camden) are worth a try too. What is true to say, is that for a city this size and given the obvious demand for good fish and chips, there aren't nearly enough places where you can get it. So you can imagine my delight when I learned about The Fish and Chip Shop in Islington, bringing (we were promised) proper battered cod, haddock and plaice to a part of town not hitherto blessed with options in this field. Or in many others, come to that.

It didn't start well. Not realising you could book, we'd turned up earlyish but still the only available space was at the bar, an area of the restaurant designed in such a way - seats too hard, counter too small and too high - not to encourage lingerers. Still, staff were friendly and some powerful, ice cold Beavertown IPA soon appeared and we settled in to browse the vast menu.

First ordered, and first to arrive, were the mysterious "London particular fritters". For whatever reason I had envisaged some kind of crunchy snack made with beer batter, but instead we were presented with three croquettes, generously proportioned and full of a rich pea and ham hock filling. They were nice enough but for £6 not exactly what I would consider a bargain. Compared to what was to follow though, they were positively delightful.

Let's get the Mushy Pea Rant out of the way before we go any further. I understand that for various reasons, none of them good, fish restaurants in London - particularly the snobbier ones although this is not always the case - have a problem with serving proper marrowfat mushy peas. Ignoring for now the question of whether they taste better than garden peas (of course they bloody do) or whether they're more appropriate to serve with fish and chips (of course they bloody are), the fact is, most of the time all you will have available is crushed or whole garden peas. OK, fine, whatever, your funeral.

But if you DO insist on only serving garden peas, DO NOT CALL THEM MUSHY PEAS ON YOUR MENU. Ordering a side of mushy peas and receiving a sad little tin of crushed petits pois is like ordering a lobster sandwich and being given a frozen prawn cocktail. They're not the same thing AT ALL and not only are you possibly in breach of the Trades Descriptions Act (1968), you run a serious risk of demonstrating to your customers that you don't have a bleeding clue what you're doing.

Fish and Chip Shop do not have a bleeding clue what they're doing. Plaice in batter, the one thing as a Fish and Chip Shop you are not allowed to cock up, was a disaster - anaemic, grease-heavy batter stinking of old oil, encasing a fish so overcooked it had lost any bright flakiness it may once have had and was now a mushy, sickening mess. Chips were fine, but were too thin (at least they weren't frites, but proper thick chip shop chips are as integral to the chip shop experience as brown sauce in a bacon sandwich), and curry sauce was too runny despite having a decent flavour.

Lemon sole wasn't quite the tragedy the plaice was, but still was overcooked and had none of that lovely firm texture you should get from sole. Done correctly, you should be able to lift the flesh off the bones in satisfying firm chunks, but this poor beast was closer to mashed potato. The skin was nicely seasoned with tarragon and you could tell that it had once been a good fresh fish, but it was not otherwise enjoyable.

We would have liked to have tried just one "wally" (gherkin) and one pickled onion but were told in no uncertain terms that it was £1 per type of pickle, not £1 for the lot (there was also egg) and so we reluctantly ordered the two portions. What arrived was a plate of three massive gherkins and three huge pickled onions. Why on God's green earth anyone thought forcing three times the amount of required pickles on customers was a good idea I don't know, but there they were anyway, perfectly OK as pickles go but just way too much of them. Would £1 for a gherkin, onion and egg on a single plate really have been that difficult to organise? I can't imagine so.

With a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc (annoyingly kept in a non-insulated bucket lined with a couple of inches of crushed ice - great if you like the last half glass of your wine to be ice cold, not great in any other respect) this catalogue of irritations, pains and downright calamaties came to a whopping £90. I realise this is North London, and fish costs more than it did, and all those etched mirrors and carved wooden details have to be paid for somehow, but even if the food had been good, that is still a lot of money. The mistakes with the cooking and mushy pea-gate just added insult to injury.

I have to entertain the idea that perhaps the Fish and Chip Shop had an off night, and that at some other time someone who knows how to operate a fryer may be working in the kitchen. There is that possibility. But I can only speak as I find, and while I do know plenty of people who've really enjoyed their time at the Fish and Chip Shop, I'm afraid I don't have the stomach, or the funds, to give it another go. Not even if they started serving proper mushy peas.

4/10



EDIT: A friend has swiftly been in touch to inform me that actually, North London has plenty of great places to eat. I'm happy to put the record straight on that. It does, but unfortunately they're all in North London. I am therefore going to start a campaign to get John Salt, the Drapers Arms, Trullo, Assiette Anglais, the Pig and Butcher and Trangallan to move to SW11. That'll teach him.

Two Brothers, Finchley

It is a cliché, repeated so often (mainly by Northerners) that it has almost become an accepted fact, that there are no decent fish and chip shops in London. This is rubbish of course; there are some good fish and chip shops, there are just lots and lots of very bad ones. But there are also lots and lots of very bad restaurants of all kinds, and just because there's a Bella Pasta on every road in the West End doesn't mean the likes of Zucca and Trullo and Polpetto get overlooked. It's something unique to chippies, this idea that unless they're all good, they all simultaneously get dismissed as bad as one homogonous bunch. And it's also vaguely patronising - why shouldn't producing a top quality battered haddock and chips be just as difficult as a nice Osso buco or Fritto Misto? Good food is never easy, particularly so fish and chips.

So put to the back of your mind the pallid, curled-up bits of fish kept warm for hours in your local takeaway, and brace yourself for the long tube ride to Zone 4, where Two Brothers restaurant has been serving lucky Finchley locals for the best part of a decade. At 7:30 on a Friday night you'd expect anywhere even half decent to be busy, and there was certainly a pleasant buzz about the place, but we were still seated immediately; most of the trade seemed focussed on the takeaway counter next door, which is either a sign of the current economic times or just that sitting down in a smart restaurant with a bottle of wine is still anathema to chippy-fanciers. We were happy for the table, though, despite the premium - I don't think even the most pristine cod & chips would have made it back to Battersea in any kind of edible form.


Usually starters are a mistake in chippies - there's food enough in a single main course portion to keep you sated for a day - but actually the deep-fried battered cod's roe was interesting enough to be worth a shot, denser and more subtly flavoured than I was expecting, and served with an earthy dollop of pickled beetroot. House bread was just supermarket baguette but you have to love the lack of pretension in the accompanying mini plastic cartons of butter.



And before I get onto the main events, I should pay special tribute to the house pickles, sweet and fresh and bouncy, and what seemed very much like a homemade tartar sauce. It's the little details, you know.


I don't know whether I should technically still be ordering cod - in fact I'm fairly sure I shouldn't - but if they taste as good as this I'm afraid you're going to have to come up with a very convincing argument to stop me, possibly involving the imminent cessation of all life on earth and the return of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. It was fantastic - a crispy (beer we were told) batter, not too thick and not too thin, containing flaky bright white very fresh fish. The chips were, well, I hesitate to use the word "perfect" but I can't for the life of me think how they might be improved upon; cooked simply in vegetable oil, once doused with malt vinegar and salt they were evocative and nostalgic and just plain delicious in the way all great food is.


Two Brothers do a matzo meal option instead of batter for an extra 50p, and my friend's haddock fared equally well in this coating, fresh and firm and tasty; I preferred the normal batter, but then I am a bit of a Northern traditionalist - I'm prepared to believe that each coating style can find an appreciative audience.

All this only goes to prove that, at the risk of stating the bleeding obvious, there is decent fish and chips to be found, you just need to do a bit of research. A bit like oh, I don't know, the kind of research any sensible person would do before parting with their money literally anywhere. It's not rocket science, just don't rock up at your nearest kebab shop and expect anything decent, do be prepared to travel and - most importantly - keep an open mind and don't dismiss every chippie in London on the back of a sad, lazy majority. There may be a dozen purveyors of dried out old haddock and oily chips for every Two Brothers, but that just makes the places like this all that more special.

8/10