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Why do you Irish love the chipper.

2

Comments

  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 28,537 ✭✭✭✭murpho999


    Chippy?

    Not an institution in Ireland at all unless you find carpenters culturally important, otherwise in Ireland have chippers.



  • Posts: 7,712 ✭✭✭ [Deleted User]


    Nothing battered could ever be bad no matter how long it sits.



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 5,257 ✭✭✭Hangdogroad




  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 4,277 ✭✭✭km991148


    I've tried many In Ireland. Most of the Dublin ones, especially that abomination, the Irish Italian Chippers Association, serve absolute pre battered muck.


    A good chip shop batters fresh, cooks fresh and has enough customers to not have cooked food waiting on display for more than a few mins. Waiting a few mins for freshly battered *fresh* fish is no brother.



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 4,277 ✭✭✭km991148


    Yep, a really shyte one.

    Get over to Scotland or somewhere where they know how to cook fish and chips (and sausage and pies and black pudding and haggis and chicken...)



  • Registered Users Posts: 217 ✭✭ohnohedidnt




  • Posts: 7,712 ✭✭✭ [Deleted User]




  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 4,277 ✭✭✭km991148


    :) Make a holiday of it, well worth it!


    All the way for a bag of chips, it could change your life.



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 4,277 ✭✭✭km991148


    Think of rather be surrounded by Glaswegians Vs Dubs.


    Fuk it, this thread has be convinced, I'm moving there, leaving Europe for a fish supper!!



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  • Registered Users Posts: 2,677 ✭✭✭Happydays2020


    Any good chippers around Dublin 2 or 4?



  • Posts: 0 [Deleted User]


    Wrong. There's Beshoff's which used to be great but last time didn't taste great. Then you've got Roma 2 on Wexford Street, and Aprile's on Richmond Street (my personal favourite in the area, as you can take the food to eat beside the canal as long as the seagulls don't get a sniff of it!



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 27,021 ✭✭✭✭Dempo1


    I live quite Rural and our local chipper run by the Grumpiest Italian I've ever met. Honestly the food is pretty dreadful, I only use occasionally if desperate. The only thing cooked fresh are the chips. He's so clueless he doesn't even hide the fact he microwaves breasts of chicken before Deeping in fryers.

    I doubt very much many if any Chippers truely cook from fresh, apart from chips, most things pre prepared, alot of this primarily down to speed of service, I suspect most customers wouldn't be impressed having to wait for a raw piece of fish to be freshly battered, and cooked from scratch, the same for chicken products. This said, there's no excuse for microwaving food before frying. Quality takeaway food can correctly be partly pre prepared for service on the day, I just think alot of chippers here, down right lazy with most products being sold Frozen.

    I even seen some chippers using pre prepared chipped potatoes, you can tell from the taste, the chemical used to preserve them leaves an after taste.

    I'm a chef by qualification and I've often wanted to jump over the counter and show my local chipper how it's done 😁 but have not due to concerns for my wellbeing 😉

    Thankfully new owners taking over soon, hopefully food will improve accordingly 😉

    Is maith an scáthán súil charad.




  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 11,476 ✭✭✭✭Ush1


    I love Apriles. Manys a night after a skinful I would wander in.



  • Posts: 2,725 ✭✭✭ [Deleted User]


    Those chipper places are competing on price with the local Chinese and the chains. All desperate to keep a meal under a tenner. So the quality has dropped significantly. It’s the same over in Engerland - the places serving fried chicken, pizza, kebabs, fish etc are in a race to the bottom, while the ‘proper’ fish and chip places are charging prices that reflect the true cost of getting fish delivered daily, slicing your own chips, making your own tartare sauce etc.



  • Registered Users Posts: 2,807 ✭✭✭ShatterAlan



    Don't know about Dublin 2 except for Burdocks in Christchurch.....but it's not great. It used to be amazing but that was decades ago. Now it average at best.

    Fusciardi's on Capel St. (Dublin 1) is decent enough. Parnell St and Dorset St have rakes of food joints so if you're not averse to going through Checkpoint Charlie and vernturing to the Northside you'll be spoiled for choice.



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  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 8,441 ✭✭✭Riddle101


    Any Irish chipper I've been in has usually shown the food being cooked on the spot. Never had much of a complaint on the quality of the food being cooked in then.



  • Registered Users Posts: 469 ✭✭jakiah


    I went for Fish & Chips in NZ and it ruined the Irish chipper for me. A selection of 6 or 7 types of fish, fresh caught (never frozen) and fresh cooked. Takes 20 minutes for an order to come out.

    That said The Salty Buoy is doing amazing Fish & Chips, check it out! https://saltybuoy.ie/



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 4,418 ✭✭✭silliussoddius


    Yeah, without the vinegar they're just spuds overcooked in a different way.



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 6,698 ✭✭✭Feisar


    This is the problem. If a pub serves fish and chips on a plate with a knife and fork for €15 for example people won't want to spend the same on a take away even if the quality is through the roof. Most people have no appreciation for quality.

    There's a fish monger in our town that started doing proper fish and chip take-aways People are flocking to it as it's seen as a cut above. I guarantee if it was just a chip shop selling the same gear no one would be in it.

    First they came for the socialists...



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 2,754 ✭✭✭beachhead


    Original poster aving an identity crisis? Best chippers are outside of Ireland and UK.Chips cooked same w\y in both countries.Fish in UK requires a spoon to each the flour mixture i.e not cooked,too much used



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  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 2,754 ✭✭✭beachhead


    Never seen this.But maybe it happens in non Irish,non Italian run establishments.Of which there are quite a few around the country.Best irish chips I had lately were in Limerick-near the railway station.



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 2,754 ✭✭✭beachhead




  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 896 ✭✭✭DarkJager21


    It’s all the same **** at the end of the day, often hear people praising places because they have brilliant chips and then you get it and you’ve had chips like that 100 times before. Suppose it’s all down to the staff and how much attention they pay to not burning or undercooking ****.



  • Posts: 11,614 ✭✭✭✭ [Deleted User]


    "Next time you are in your local chipshop ask when the food was battered, ask what temperature the food in the little window is and why it isnt even turned on."


    Next time you are in a chipshop, pi$$ off the people preparing your food? Yeah thats a great idea, I'm definitely going to do that!



  • Registered Users Posts: 678 ✭✭✭Esho




  • Registered Users Posts: 678 ✭✭✭Esho


    Agree, I spent a good 2 months trying out the chippers when I moved to Cork. When i went to Lennoxs I got frozen chips - I reckon they just cater for pist people now.

    Dino's is hands down the best. No 2 is the Golden Fry up in Ballintemple - amazing fish dinners, amazing portions. Corkys love their mushy peas and potato pies, but cant get a decent garlic sauce anywhere. No decent kebab shops that does their own bread either. The real capital ...



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 8,184 ✭✭✭riclad


    chippers are cheap, they are a small local business, not owned by corporations and they are open after 11pm.theres nothing like a good plate of fish and chips .i think the best ones are run by italians who came here in the 70s. they make the best chips



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 2,108 ✭✭✭boombang


    Dunno where the OP's from, but I can't help reading "you Irish" in a sneery English accent.


    Disclaimer. I did a lot of my growing up in the UK and would have what many consider an English accent myself, just not a sneery one.


    Think the OP needs to find a better chipper.



  • Posts: 0 [Deleted User]


    Best fish and chips I ever had were from a food truck type van in Howth Harbour one summer many, many years ago. Sat on a wall and ate them out of a little plastic tray with a plastic fork.

    God, I can still taste it.



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 369 ✭✭Timmyr


    I live in NZ and the fish is great but the chips are crap! plus they dont have vinegar in the chippers



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  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 16,514 ✭✭✭✭whisky_galore


    Hate vinegar, like dousing your food with piss.



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 6,941 ✭✭✭sporina


    Is Fortes on Dorest St still on the go? When I lived in Drumcondra as a student I use to get a bag of chips and garlic mayo from it on the way home from the pub.. wow.. I would almost go to Dublin for a weekend or something just to have a bag of 'em again.. divine.. and in my college days I got my fix for something like €1.10 I think.. divine.. proper chips (Italian Style)



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 43,028 ✭✭✭✭SEPT 23 1989


    Eating a single of chips drowned in salt and vinegar directly from the bag is one of life's simple pleasures



  • Posts: 13,688 ✭✭✭✭ Konnor Little Ruler


    Pouring chips from the bag onto a plate ought to result in a custodial sentence. Criminal carry on.



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 13,015 ✭✭✭✭The Nal


    Don't think the Irish chippy has any life left in it. The scary costs are one thing, but so is the scary lack of customers.




  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 7,699 ✭✭✭Gusser09


    Well the quality that a lot of chippers are serving is atrocious. I wouldn't give it to my dog. The last few times I have been to my locals the chips have been reheated. The are stuck together, under cooked and soggy.

    €7.50 for a 2 sausages and chips. Nah your grand.

    The only have themselves to blame. They will get away with serving a few bad bags of chips but words gets around quickly in smaller towns when the quality dipped for so many.



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 13,015 ✭✭✭✭The Nal


    Kinda like Guinness. Much better in busier shops. But no ones really eating chippy food anymore. I was a 3-4 times a week man in my teens. Think Ive had one chippy in the last 3-4 years.

    Its just outdated food now. All good thing....



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 14,452 ✭✭✭✭ednwireland


    in country towns they just don't have the turnover so its frozen fish bagged chips all the way. where i grew up in the UK as far from the sea as you could get it was fresh potatoes double fried and fresh fish. they are all Indian takeaway now.

    so I rarely have takeaway chips as they aren't nice.

    noticed our old chipper having the front bricked up so that's not coming back.



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 8,409 ✭✭✭corner of hells


    That’s a ploy , you’ll find that all the poor chippers and the sole good one (pun intended ) are owned by the same person , it’s just to generate good publicity .



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  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 662 ✭✭✭Yeah Right


    1. Excluding Liam Brady of course, there's no such thing as an Irish chippy, they're called chippers over here.
    2. That article is absolutely outrageously bad. €32 for potatoes? For how many/what sort of weight is that? A 25kg bag of spuds is €16 and that's retail prices. A commercial entity that goes through two bags of those a day is gonna be paying a lot, lot less than that for spuds. Like less than a tenner for 25kg. An average serving is about 3-400g so let's round that up to 500g to account for waste etc. That's 50 servings per sack of spuds.
    3. A €10 sack producing 50 servings of chips works out at €0.20 per bag of chips. The absolute neck of some chippers reheating a few chips to save 20c when they're charging stupid money for them (Giuseppe's on Baggott St is a fiver a bag and a tenner for a fish....... €15 is scandalous money).
    4. Like most businesses, they're finding out the hard way that there's only so much blood you can squeeze out of a stone. Years of cutting back on quality while also slyly increasing prices have meant that it just isn't worth it anymore. Now the chickens are coming home to roost and people won't settle for the crap quality and high prices. Same as everywhere, really. People vote with their wallet, if you're not good enough to stay in business then you'll go out of business. Trying to guilt-trip others into propping up your unsustainable business is a fool's errand.
    5. The article is nothing more than a fluff piece to drum up business and sympathy for the Borzas. Chips in their chipper are €4.50 a bag in feckin' Walkinstown. No wonder they're trying to save face by claiming their costs are through the roof.




  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 662 ✭✭✭Yeah Right


    I realise I'm 10+ years too late to reply to this, but every chipper I've ever had in either the UK or NI, they've battered the fish in front of my eyes before cooking it. Every single time, for the last 20-odd years. I've NEVER had that happen in Ireland. The amount of doughy, claggy, lumpy, sweaty, uncooked batter on most chipper fish here is ridiculous. It's supposed to be light and crispy, not dense and cloying.



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 13,015 ✭✭✭✭The Nal


    Or rock hard like when I broke off 80% of my back tooth eating a smoked cod from Silvios one time.



  • Registered Users Posts: 4,590 ✭✭✭blue note


    It's sad to see them die out as they really were institutions. When I was growing up (90s) a takeaway meant a chipper. There was a chinese in the town too and that grew in popularity, but if you didn't have time to make a dinner, they fed you. In my teen years I worked in one. I suspect the standards in chippers is / was appalling, but the one I worked in I couldn't fault. The place was scrubbed at the end of each evening, food temps were checked and recorded, the temp the hot food was stored at was monitered, the fridges and freezers checked too. And everything only cooked once, there was certainly never a sausage, fish or piece of chicken reheated.


    Now though, I just can't understand how people like the food in them. The chips tend to be greasy, very rarely crispy. The burgers are flavourless, the buns consistently terrible. The menus are far too big - the only way to offer menus that size is to freeze half the stuff. And when they're buying in pre-made frozen stuff it's going to be awful. I wouldn't buy it in a supermaket, I certainly don't want to pay anyone to serve it to me.


    The item which epitomises how bad the food in chippers tend to be though is the battered sausage. They should be battered and then fried and then given to you. That way they should be delicious. Instead though, they slice them down the middle, so those tasty sausage fats leak out and the inside gets dehydrated by the vegetable oil instead of the actual sausage steaming inside. And typically, you're probably getting one that was half cooked to speed up service meaning that it's even more dehydrated and greasy. The fact that the majority of chippers can't cook a battered sausage really is a sad indictment of them.


    I will admit that I find the majority of takeaways terrible though, so maybe I'm not the best person to judge them. Chinese's perhaps the worst - everything on the menu tastes gloopy. Pizzas are up there too. Indians are probably the least worst of them, but I'd still say the majority of them are awful.


    The one way I think chippers could save themselves though is if they tried to make nice food and abandoned trying to sell everything. You can't sell burgers, sausages, fish, chicken, kebabs, pizzas, pies, etc and expect to do it all well. The quality of food trucks tends to be great in Ireland now, but you'll find that they do pizza or burgers or dumplings or bao buns or whatever. The chippers need to get rid of the majority of their menu and figure out how to make what's left on their menus delicious. Firstly, for God's sake get the chips right. If you can't make nice chips look for a new career now. Then if you're going to do burgers don't just buy in frozen ones from musgraves and hope they're grand. If this is your business, you need to know everything about it. If you're not interested in what cut of beef goes into them, what fat ratios and what breed of cow then don't do burgers. If you're not going to try to figure out how to make the tastiest burgers why would anyone go to you? If you're going to do fish then source fresh fish, make your batter and serve fresh battered fish. If they're not going to try to move with the times, they don't deserve to survive.



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 272 ✭✭j2


    This is odd but the voice and manner of the guy giving me the fish and chips has an impact. The guy in burdocks in howth had a strong Dublin accent, which I don't, and he was very chill and relaxed. I loved it. Same thing I had fish achips in a fancy spot in Dalkey and it was nice, but I wasn't all set to nut. These are the fundamental mysteries of life.



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 2,262 ✭✭✭sprucemoose


    i generally order batter sausages when i get chips and i've never got one that was cut lengthways



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  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 43,028 ✭✭✭✭SEPT 23 1989


    Standards have fallen drastically in my local chippers and Chinese while prices have skyrocketed

    the Indian has remained consistently good while only increasing prices slightly



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 2,262 ✭✭✭sprucemoose


    jackie lennox has definitely gone a bit downhill in the last few years but i can guarantee they didnt serve you frozen chips. having said that i wont be going there next time im home. barties is pretty close and i find it to be much better overall

    dinos is fairly decent to be fair but i dont know about it being the best. the golden fry, murphys or the fish wife (although thats gone i think?) are probably the best in the city, have heard good things about chish n fips out in crosshaven too

    and nobody refers to corkonians as 'corkys' ffs.....



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 2,520 ✭✭✭Sgt Hartman


    Best fish and chips I've had in ages was from Donkey Ford's in Limerick a couple of weeks ago. I went for the whiting which was really nice. Two pieces of battered whiting and loads of chips wrapped in paper the old fashioned way. A week before that I ordered a fresh cod and chips for myself and the OH in Macari's in Balbriggan. While it was decent it was nowhere near as good as the one from Donkey's. The price was ridiculous also. I ordered from Just Eat for delivery and the total came to approx €28. And that was with no extras.



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 25,796 ✭✭✭✭Strumms


    There is so much competition.

    im my area the takeaways used to be only chipper / Chinese / pizza

    now doing takeaway… chipper, Chinese , pizza, Indian, Italian, Thai, posh sandwich shops x2 …. All the pubs now do carvary take away since covid… so probably with the variety, chippers are doing less and costs are big.

    for the consumer : the expense is a thing too….more focus on health and healthy eating is a thing too…

    quarter pounder with cheese and regular chips in my local one… now 9 euros…. Place is out the door at weekends but mostly because it’s next door to a really busy pub… but quiet during the week….



  • Registered Users Posts: 685 ✭✭✭ghostfacekilla


    I romanticise the effect this food will have on me to a level only explained by insanity and once I can't eat another morsel, I feel ill for a few hours. Eventually, I forget and do it again...like a micro version of forgetting the pain of childbirth and suggesting we should try for another baby.



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