Chippers and Deli's

stellios

With all the Italian take away chippers in Ireland, can some please explain to me why there are no chippers in Italy, or europe for that matter??

Also why is Ireland the only place where you can get a hot chichen roll at a deli??

chin_grin

'cos of the spuds.............and chickens.

Fowler87

stellios wrote: »

With all the Italian take away chippers in Ireland, can some please explain to me why there are no chippers in Italy, or europe for that matter??

Also why is Ireland the only place where you can get a hot chichen roll at a deli??

What dya expect to get, cavier

The King of Moo

Because on most of the continent, and particularly Italy, people have a much better diet than here and Britain, and wouldn't dream of eating battered fish and chips.

As far as I remember, Italians here and particularly in Scotland after World War II, saw our appetite for fish and chips and saw that as a good way to make money.

kfallon

stellios wrote: »

Also why is Ireland the only place where you can get a hot chichen roll at a deli??

And I bet you are having one of them hot chicken rolls for lunch right now....or a snack box from Macari's :P

Just be grateful we have them

knird evol

Italians eat good food. But they can manage to fix up the sort of crap that we want to eat.

stellios

Fowler87 wrote: »

What dya expect to get, cavier

That doesnt make sense, why would i want cavier, im talking about a chicken fillet roll

mikemac

Ha, moved to Dublin and I found a bag of chips was a "single" and fish n' chips was a one and one, pronounced wan n' wan

Doesn't happen anywhere else in Ireland

jonnyfingers

In Italy they actually have good food so no need for chippers really.

Azureus

kfallon wrote: »

And I bet you are having one of them hot chicken rolls for lunch right now....or a snack box from Macari's :P

Just be grateful we have them

Been dying for one of these all week...had just put it outta my head and BAM!

Urge to resist temptation waning...

stellios

kfallon wrote: »

And I bet you are having one of them hot chicken rolls for lunch right now....or a snack box from Macari's :P

Just be grateful we have them

Im having neither, but i would like both:D I wonder this because it seems to be all Italians who run these chippers, so when i went to italy I thought I would get a nice chipper. I dont think this is a rediculas assumption??

Icyseanfitz

and yet they still have mc donalds

stovelid

Damn.

Get here too late and all the inter-rail generalizations have been snapped up.

I see your 'good food' and raise you a 'passion for life', 'expressive and joyful sense of humanity' and 'effete, shit chino-wearing, arse-pinching moped-abuser'.

kfallon

Azureus wrote: »

Been dying for one of these all week...had just put it outta my head and BAM!

Urge to resist temptation waning...

Please accept my deepest apologies good sir!

And don't forget the curry sauce with the snack box.....









....oh and the battered sausage

The King of Moo

jonnyfingers wrote: »

In Italy they actually have good food so no need for chippers really.

Exactly.

Particularly if you go outside the big cities, the only kind of takeaway food you'll find is pizza.

I was explaining to a woman from a smallish city what Chinese food generally consisted of, after I was talking about having Chinese takeaway here.
She knew Chinese people had to eat something, but had no idea what, and had a delightful, slightly confused look on her face as I told her about kung po and chow mein .

You'll find Chinese takeaways in the big cities but not many other types, and they're generally only used by young people and then very occasionally.

Some Italian people can be a bit too conservative about food, arguing that there's a limited range of toppings that should go on pizza, and rarely if ever trying other nationalities' cooking, but I don't blame them in the slightest.

thebigbiffo

italian food isn't that good for you over all. loads of high carb stuff, loads of cheese, loads of white breads. i'd hazard a guess that 'traditional' irish food is no worse than the italians - it's just that immigrants here saw a market for fast food and got a rep for owning chippers.

Azureus

kfallon wrote: »

Please accept my deepest apologies good sir!

And don't forget the curry sauce with the snack box.....









....oh and the battered sausage

Its good lady, excuse you! No woman can order a battered sausage without getting curious looks from the man behind the counter so Ill stick to onion rings...nom nom...

DAMMIT!

jonnyfingers

But also in Italy their cheap "street food" is actually good too. Fried pasta, calzones, deep fried sage leaves even.

I'd love to know how the Italians got into the fast food business here.

The King of Moo

stovelid wrote: »

Damn.

Get here too late and all the inter-rail generalizations have been snapped up.

I see your 'good food' and raise you a 'passion for life', 'expressive and joyful sense of humanity' and 'effete, shit chino-wearing, arse-pinching moped-abuser'.

Fresh ingredients including lots of veg, pasta and olive oil, and huge varieties of dishes is infinitely better than spuds + some meat + another veg.

We have come on in leaps and bounds with our approach to food in this country, but all of the good food we eat is mostly other national dishes.

We barely have any national cuisine of our own.
Bacon and cabbage, stew and not much else.

Icyseanfitz

The King of Moo wrote: »

Exactly.

Particularly if you go outside the big cities, the only kind of takeaway food you'll find is pizza.

I was explaining to a woman from a smallish city what Chinese food generally consisted of, after I was talking about having Chinese takeaway here.
She knew Chinese people had to eat something, but had no idea what, and had a delightful, slightly confused look on her face as I told her about kung po and chow mein .

You'll find Chinese takeaways in the big cities but not many other types, and they're generally only used by young people and then very occasionally.

Some Italian people can be a bit too conservative about food, arguing that there's a limited range of toppings that should go on pizza, and rarely if ever trying other nationalities' cooking, but I don't blame them in the slightest.

again id stake money on mcdonalds being around some corner or other

mikemac

Pastries for breakfast in the hotel buffet last time I was there

I wouldn't say that's much better for you then an Ulster fry

They have good food but no better or worse then anywhere else

thebigbiffo

jonnyfingers wrote: »

I'd love to know how the Italians got into the fast food business here.

http://itica.ie/history/

policarp

Icyseanfitz wrote: »

and yet they still have mc donalds

You're not offered a condom with a McDonalds. . .

Icyseanfitz

policarp wrote: »

You're not offered a condom with a McDonalds. . .

yeah you just get the contents in your burger

jonnyfingers

Icyseanfitz wrote: »

again id stake money on mcdonalds being around some corner or other

No Starbucks though!

The King of Moo

Icyseanfitz wrote: »

again id stake money on mcdonalds being around some corner or other

Oh yeah, I took that for granted! But generally, there's far fewer than here, and only in the very big cities.

I think that there's only one in Florence, and it's mostly used by tourists.

kfallon

Azureus wrote: »

Its good lady, excuse you! No woman can order a battered sausage without getting curious looks from the man behind the counter so Ill stick to onion rings...nom nom...

DAMMIT!

Apologies again Ma'am!!

Battered sausages are ok, they'll think you are hetero!

Onion rings they'll think you are lezzie :P

Them's the rules!

stellios

Sure McDonalds is everywhere!

I reckon Italian food is much better in Ireland than it is in Italy, thats my opinion.
Whats good about our restaurants is you can get any type of food, Italian, Irish, Chinease in one place. In Italy limited to Italian

stovelid

The King of Moo wrote: »

Fresh ingredients including lots of veg, pasta and olive oil, and huge varieties of dishes is infinitely better than spuds + some meat + another veg.

You won't be working the land on that pasta stuff.

It's OK if you're standing around pinching tourists' arses and pickpocketing in a piazza though.

The King of Moo

thebigbiffo wrote: »

italian food isn't that good for you over all. loads of high carb stuff, loads of cheese, loads of white breads. i'd hazard a guess that 'traditional' irish food is no worse than the italians - it's just that immigrants here saw a market for fast food and got a rep for owning chippers.

That's true but it's balanced out by the fact that they usually have a tiny breakfast, sometimes just an espresso, eat at a leisurely pace (dinner will often take two hours sometimes), often go for a long walk after a meal and pretty much never eat processed food, just fresh ingredients.

The King of Moo

mikemac wrote: »

Pastries for breakfast in the hotel buffet last time I was there

I wouldn't say that's much better for you then an Ulster fry

They have good food but no better or worse then anywhere else

They'll usually only eat one though, and in the summer they might just have an espresso.

Icyseanfitz

its a the freshesta of the ingredients..a

Scanlas The 2nd

thebigbiffo wrote: »

italian food isn't that good for you over all. loads of high carb stuff, loads of cheese, loads of white breads. i'd hazard a guess that 'traditional' irish food is no worse than the italians - it's just that immigrants here saw a market for fast food and got a rep for owning chippers.

Not to mention all the pasta which is very damaging.

jester77

stellios wrote: »

With all the Italian take away chippers in Ireland, can some please explain to me why there are no chippers in Italy, or europe for that matter??

Also why is Ireland the only place where you can get a hot chichen roll at a deli??

There are chippers, and lots of them. Come over here and I will show you some fantastic dönerchips and currywurst takeaways. And if you are in Italy, well... it all goes on a da Pizza, try the Italian sausage & chip pizzas, only had lunch and I'm drooling

whiskeyman

the below has lots more info on it.
Also, there was a brilliant documentary called 'Chippers' shown in the IFI, and then on TG4 a while ago.
Hopefully it's up on the net.

Irish Times Article from a while back wrote:

How fish and chips enriched a nation


IRISH VISITORS to Italy will no doubt have noticed that its national dish is not burger and chips. You do not swing onto Rome’s Via del Corso to be met by the smell of boiling oil. You do not sit down for dinner, and choose an antipasto of batter burger and onion rings. Which has always made it somewhat curious that the Italians in Ireland became renowned for their chippers, and that many of the names that were serving fish and chips half a century ago will still be serving snack boxes to peckish or drunken Irish this and every weekend.

It began sometime in the 1880s, when an Italian, Giuseppe Cervi, stepped off an American-bound boat that had stopped in Cobh and kept walking until he reached Dublin. There, he worked as a labourer until he earned enough money to buy a coal-fired cooker and a hand-cart, from which he sold chips outside pubs.

Soon after, he found a permanent spot on Great Brunswick Street (now Pearse Street), where his wife Palma would ask customers ‘Uno di questo, uno di quello?’, meaning ‘one of this and one of the other?’ In doing so, Palma helped to coin a Dublin phrase, ‘one and one’, which is still a common way of asking for fish and chips. The shop, meanwhile, had launched an industry.

Much of what is known about the history of the chipper is detailed in the wonderful work of John K Walton, a professor of social history at the University of Central Lancashire. In 1994, he wrote a book, Fish and Chips and the British Working Class, 1870-1940 , and it is an invaluable addition to the admittedly small library of chipper histories.

In it, we learn that, by 1909, there were 20 fish and chip shops in Dublin, serving a population of only 290,000. This, though, was nothing compared with the size of the trade in British cities, where the relationship between chippers and Italians originated.

In 1905, there was a fish and chip shop for every 400 citizens of Leeds and Bradford.

The chipper had first become popular in the north of England, as a happy amalgam of fried fish and cooked potato trades that had grown separately during the mid-1800s. ‘It is not clear which area, and still less which individual, deserves the credit for bringing about the momentous marriage of fish and chips,‘ writes Walton. ‘This is a matter of murky and probably insoluble dispute.‘ However, it is guessed that it happened sometime between the 1860s and 1890s.

It was in Scotland that the Italians began to make the fish and chip trade their own. Why they were so taken by the business isn’t clear, though Walton suggests that it may have been because they saw the fish and chip shops of London as they passed through there on their way north. With Italians leading the way, Scotland was home to 4,500 chippers by 1914. In Glasgow alone, an estimated 800,000 fish suppers were being sold every week.

Naturally, the shops often doubled as ice-cream parlours.

With the Italian immigrants to Ireland, then, came the chip shops. These were not the first Italians to make an impression in Ireland. Stucco workers had been imported to work on the big houses of the country; the tiling, glasswork and ornamental woodwork in Belfast’s glorious Crown Bar were created by Italians moonlighting in between working on Catholic churches.

Others were brought here as musicians and dancers.

But for individual impact few Italian immigrants could rival Charles Bianconi. Originally a purveyor of gilded frames, Bianconi realised that there had to be an alternative to lugging the goods around on his back. So, in 1815, he set up a coach service, with the first route running from Clonmel, Co Tipperary to Cahir, Co Waterford. By the middle of the century, his routes criss-crossed the island and he had become a very wealthy man indeed. By the time Bianconi died, in 1875, the railway was well on its way to killing the coach business, but he had been responsible for the country’s first integrated transport system.

Still, it is through their chippers that the Italian population in Ireland served up an example of how a relatively small number of newcomers could imprint themselves on the national culture, psyche and, in this case, stomach.

Almost all of the Italian chipper families in Ireland come from a district of six villages in the province of Frosinone, and they originally came here as the subdivision of land at home led to mass migration from rural Italy. Families such as the Borzas, Caffellos and Macaris are still the names on the Guinness-blackened tongues of Saturday nights.

These Italians came to Dublin via Paris, then Scotland or resorts in the south of England, where they would no doubt have seen the success their compatriots had had in the fish and chip trade there. In Ireland, they managed to replicate that success, although some regions proved hard to crack. Walton points out that, given how the migration chain would have gone from Scotland through the north of Ireland, it is odd that Belfast ‘provided inhospitable soil for Italian fish friers in the early twentieth century’. Belfast remained resolutely keen on oysters and shrimps instead of fried fish. The post-pub trade in oysters has clearly not lasted. Instead, it was Dublin and Cork in which the chippers first took hold, although it’s worth noting that Ireland’s well-known fish and chip shop, Beshoff, was set up by a Ukrainian immigrant, Ivan Beshov, who had taken part in the 1905 mutiny on the Potemkin and fled west through Turkey and London, until he landed in Ireland where he was first arrested and interned in the Curragh camp on suspicion of being a German spy.

Once he became free, he set up a chip shop with the help of Italian friends, and had to restart it after it was destroyed in a bombing of Dublin’s North Strand by the Germans in 1941. It went on to become something of a Dublin institution. When he died in 1987, his birth certificate said he was 102 years old, but he had insisted that he was 104.

The Chinese in Ireland, also a small population for most of the twentieth century, had an impact on the taste buds and street fronts of a great many Irish towns and villages. The Chinese migrants of the 1950s to 1970s came mostly from Hong Kong, leaving their homes because of economic pressures brought about by a collapse in the local rice farming industry.

They travelled through Britain and on to the north of Ireland, because their status as Commonwealth citizens allowed them free movement until a change in the law in 1962 limited the flow of immigrants.

With them came the Chinese restaurant that had grown in popularity in Britain during the post-war years. Ireland’s first opened in 1957, in a house on Leeson Street. There are now about 6,000 Chinese restaurants in the country. The first Chinese restaurant opened only a year after the first Indian restaurant, the Golden Orient, was also opened on Leeson Street. Its proprietor, Mike Butt, was an East African Indian who had come to Ireland from Kenya, and upon opening he found that most Irish people just wanted to order steak. So he served steak, but the Golden Orient survived as an Indian restaurant for those looking for a little culinary adventure.

THE NUMBER OF INDIAN RESTAURANTS did not explode in the way that Chinese restaurants did, and certainly not as they did in the UK, although this is largely down to how little Asian migration there was to Ireland. Still, the two countries share certain trends. Even now, when most people in Britain or Ireland go for Indian food, they are probably eating in a Bangladeshi restaurant, as it is they who have popularised the cuisine of the subcontinent of which their country used to be part.

Although, this is not always true. Some are run by Pakistanis.

All of these culinary offcuts might seem like a bit of a diversion, but they also serve as peculiar reminders of how a small influx of migrants – even a single migrant – can have an impact on a national culture

The King of Moo

Scanlas The 2nd wrote: »

Not to mention all the pasta which is very damaging.

True, but they eat much smaller portions than us.
For them, it's never the base of an entire meal like it is here, just a small course, usually just with sauce and no meat, and then followed by the meat course.

There's a good article here explaining why the Mediterranean diet's healthy despite not appearing to be so (something that confused me for a long time).

http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=56058

It's not just about what they eat, but also how much, and they have a whole different attitude to food than us.

stellios

thebigbiffo wrote: »

http://itica.ie/history/

So America got the mafia and we got chippers, good deal:D

Guy:Incognito

Italy actuall does have a lower rate of McDonalds than here (about 1 for evey 206k people compared to our 83k) but lets be honest, the same generalisations about everything in Ireland being **** (in this case the food) and europe being the Utopia would be applied t say, Germany, where they have more Mcdonalds per head than us.

jonnyfingers

stovelid wrote: »

You won't be working the land on that pasta stuff.

It's OK if you're standing around pinching tourists' arses and pickpocketing in a piazza though.

Well pasta is high in carbohydrates, the same as spuds, so I don't see why not. But I assume you're joking.

Snakeblood

stellios wrote: »

With all the Italian take away chippers in Ireland, can some please explain to me why there are no chippers in Italy, or europe for that matter??

Also why is Ireland the only place where you can get a hot chichen roll at a deli??

Italians have gelaterias to get fresh icecream, and pizzerias, to get fresh slices of pizza, possibly with salad on them. GOD I LOVE THEM. Chips don't come close.

NB I LOVE CHIPS

The King of Moo

Guy:Incognito wrote: »

Italy actuall does have a lower rate of McDonalds than here (about 1 for evey 206k people compared to our 83k) but lets be honest, the same generalisations about everything in Ireland being **** (in this case the food) and europe being the Utopia would be applied t say, Germany, where they have more Mcdonalds per head than us.

I think the north of Europe is actually more similar to use, in terms of food and alcohol especially. Lots of spuds, meat and beer.

But in the south there's a much healthier attitude towards food and diet.

I should point out that though I'm defending the Mediterranean diet a lot here, I do enjoy an occasional visit to the chipper or Chinese .

sbsquarepants

Icyseanfitz wrote: »

again id stake money on mcdonalds being around some corner or other

I don't know about the rest of Italy, but in rome there are fast food places everywhere, from big chains to greasy spoon type kips. Can't remember the name but there's this one place that specialises in ribs and steaks, but in a mcdonalds kind of way, rather than a "how would sir like his steak cooked?" way. Nom, nom, nom.

As far as i could see, they eat just as much shíte as we do, and it's every bit as shítey.

As i type i'm sitting at my desk eating shredded wheat and feeling very, very sorry for myself!:mad:

stovelid

jonnyfingers wrote: »

Well pasta is high in carbohydrates,

And homo vitamins.

Marty McFly

If the mediteranean diet is so healthy why is it that when you go to these countrys while most of them look stunning in there younger years, when they get bit older the majority seem to be an awful state overweight etc?

Its always baffled me.

watna

In NZ the fish and chip shops are all fun by Asians (Chinese/Vietnamese). They make good chips People think I'm mad when I tell them in Ireland Italian people own them. I've always found it weird.

stellios

Id rather eat in an Italian restaurant in Ireland than in Italy any day..

So you cannot get a battered saussage/snack box/Onion rings in Italy.

Also, does Chinease food in China taste the same as Chinease food here??

The King of Moo

stellios wrote: »

Sure McDonalds is everywhere!

I reckon Italian food is much better in Ireland than it is in Italy, thats my opinion.
Whats good about our restaurants is you can get any type of food, Italian, Irish, Chinease in one place. In Italy limited to Italian

I'm sorry but that's the wrongest thing I've ever seen in my life.

The basic pasta you get is immensely better than Napoli or Roma stuff, and so much cheaper.

Their fruit and veg sections are usually much bigger and have a huge variety of different vegetables you don't find here.

Homemade or even shopbought passata is lightyears ahead of Dolmio or Ragu.

And the €4 takeaway pizzas are infinitely tastier than any I've eaten in a restaurant here, including Italian restaurants.

I hope you sampled lots of proper Italian cuisine while you were there.

If you did and still don't think it's as nice as here then fair enough, that's your opinion (and it can be hard for some people to get used to Italian food compared to our version of it, as they don't load it with as many different flavours).

But still, :mad:

The King of Moo

stellios wrote: »

Id rather eat in an Italian restaurant in Ireland than in Italy any day..

So you cannot get a battered saussage/snack box/Onion rings in Italy.

Also, does Chinease food in China taste the same as Chinease food here??

I tried Chinese in Florence, it was ok, but very bland. Probably because Italian food doesn't tend to have very strong tastes.

(Sorry, misread, thought you were asking about Chinese in Italy for some reason)

But seriously, why would you want chipper food in Italy when you can get it here?
I hope you weren't looking for pubs there too.

I hope you're trolling at this stage.

The King of Moo

luvbulmers01 wrote: »

If the mediteranean diet is so healthy why is it that when you go to these countrys while most of them look stunning in there younger years, when they get bit older the majority seem to be an awful state overweight etc?

Its always baffled me.

They tend to eat more as they get older, and get a lot less physically active.

Sean Quagmire

I've never had chipper chips like the ones we get here anywhere else I have traveled.

Even in Britain its all that frozen skinny style manky chips.

Scanlas The 2nd

The King of Moo wrote: »

They tend to eat more as they get older, and get a lot less physically active.

Also anything made from grains is bad for you as our bodies didn't evolve to eat digest them properly and will take it's toll on you over a lifetime.