- Hey, guys!
It's Ju.
- And it's Harry.
- And today, we're going around five
of London's best fish and chip shops
to find the best fish and chips in London.
- [Harry] So what makes
great fish and chips?
We're gonna be judging
ours on five criteria.
The fish itself, we want flaky batter.
We want crispy batter that
snaps when you bite into it,
and the fish we want to
be really flaky inside
and have just a really nice flavor.
The chips we want nice
and crispy on the outside,
fluffy on the inside, and well seasoned
with salt and vinegar.
And then also, we're gonna
look at price as well.
Are there any tourist-trap spots
that are gonna rip you off?
- So it's 7:30 in the
morning, and we're starting
our journey at Billingsgate Market.
This place is a proper
old East End institution.
It's the biggest fish market in the UK,
so lots of things to check out inside
including the Billingsgate Cafe,
where we start our journey.
- So I don't know about you, Ju,
but I'm ready to eat some fish and chips.
- Yes.
- Let's go.
- I've been working down in
the fish market since '97.
We've got fish. We do breakfast.
We basically cater for the market.
It's a tradition. A lot
of people come down here
to get fresh fish, don't they?
A lot of people come here
as well for the haddock
and the poached eggs.
- [Both] Thank you!
- [Harry] Ju, visually,
talk to me about your first
impressions of this fish.
- Well, this is literally
the biggest plate
of fish and chips I think I've ever had.
It's come in on this, like, wonderful,
like, circular display,
which I'm absolutely loving.
There's a lot of salad
and red onion and coleslaw
on the plate.
The overbearing thing on this plate though
is like the huge, huge,
huge wad of chips here.
- So, the fish.
A little bit unusual in a couple of ways.
Firstly, it's sea bass,
which is not the average fish
that tends to get served in
London's fish and chip shops.
You're usually looking at more
sort of cod or a flaky fish like that.
Also, they won't batter the fish here,
which I'm actually
slightly disappointed in
because they just dredge it
in flour and then fry it,
and you don't get quite
the same level of crisp
with just a flour dredge
as opposed to batter.
But, you know, I'm willing
to be convinced, so hopefully
the fish inside is
gonna taste really good.
- Chip cheers!
- [Harry] It's a really good chip.
- [Ju] It's a good chip.
- [Harry] It's a good chip.
- It's not greasy. It's just
that you can like basically
taste the oil rather than like
an overwhelming potato taste.
It's nice. It's really light.
I feel like getting through
that would be quite easy.
- Very easy.
Particularly given how
wide the surface area is
on these flatter chips,
they have actually got the
inside quite nice and fluffy,
which is good, and that's
one of our criteria
that we're looking for.
Again, like, just on paper
and just structurally,
I'm still not sure about
if it's a fish-and-chip-shop
chip, but it tastes good.
So, OK, I think we need to try the fish.
- We do need to try the fish.
- I'm gonna grab my fork.
- The taste of the actual fish inside
of what's extremely light floury batter
is unbelievably good.
- [Harry] That's really good fish.
It's flaky, which is
again one of our criteria
that we're looking for.
It just almost like kinda falls apart
and melts in your mouth.
Really well-seasoned.
- This is, it's just really
lovely, quality fish.
I think you can just taste the freshness,
like it hasn't traveled
from all across London.
It's just come like straight
here in the morning,
probably arrived here at
4 o'clock in the morning,
and then we're eating
it at like 7, 8 o'clock.
So this costs 10 pounds,
which is roughly about $13.
I feel like this is a good,
filling fish breakfast,
which is not a sentence
that I've said before,
but good value for money.
It's cheap as chips.
- [Harry] Next, we traveled
to the Golden Chippy
in South East London,
which is the No.1-ranked
fish and chip shop on TripAdvisor.
We're going to check it out
and see if it lives up to its reviews.
- My name is Chris. I'm from Cyprus.
I came here when I was 17 years old.
I was hoping to become
a surgeon of humans.
I ended up being a surgeon of the fish.
Golden Chippy has been open for 15 years.
I started from scratch,
but these hands have been playing
with fish for 42 years now.
With this secret recipe of the batter,
cooked at the right temperature,
sitting there for one or two
minutes to drain properly
gives it that fantastic crispy finish,
which is very light batter,
very tasty fish, and not greasy at all.
- So we've got this
absolutely massive plate
of cod and chips here with a nice load
of mushy peas at the side and some salad.
- So just looking at this,
I am super excited to tuck in.
The batter is visibly crispy
and the chips as well,
these are like proper chip shop chips.
We've got that kinda
thickness on all sides,
nice and golden brown on the outside.
I'm hoping nice and light
and fluffy on the inside,
but we're gonna find out.
Cheers!
- OK, cheers!
This is like so unbelievably smooth
and just like really, really nice
sort of like fish-flow texture.
It's just absolutely melting in my mouth.
- This is worthy of the first
"oh, my cod" of the day.
- No, ah, you stole my pun!
You stole my pun!
Haddock you got some of
your own puns, Harry?
- The batter is extremely crispy.
It lives up to how it
looks, and you really get
that nice texture of
the contrasted textures
between the crisp of the batter
and the flaky, soft,
melt-in-the-mouth fish.
It's really, really good.
We saw them preparing these
chips from scratch out the back,
which is great 'cause you know
they're not just buying in a frozen thing.
This is like a freshly
made, freshly peeled potato.
- Mm.
- M-hm.
- You can taste potato,
which is always good for a chippy chip,
like normally with chippy chips
they might be a little bit too greasy,
but this is just, I mean, the taste
of the potato inside, it's
obviously coming through.
- Also, they fry it in just
the same oil as the fish,
so I'm getting like almost a
little fishy taste from it.
- I love the fishy taste.
- Yeah.
- [Ju] Next, we head up to our third stop,
Hook, in North London.
- We wanted to do something different
to the traditional fish-and-chips dish
by adding tempura and panko
and flavoring them and
doing a more new-school take.
- We predominantly use tempura batter
because it allows us to
be consistently creative
and infuse different
flavors with our fresh fish.
We are bringing a new-school kinda vibe
to fish and chips, and that's
cool and quite exciting.
- So we're at our third location.
This is Hook in Camden.
We've just been given
some garlic truffle mayo,
some seaweed-salted chips,
nice little wedge of lemon,
and this lovely piece of sea bream
with basil and lemon tempura.
It smells amazing, and it's
just arrived at our table.
- The chips are interesting.
They're kind of like
a cross between chips and potato wedges
because they're really thin,
but they've still got
the skin on the fries.
Not the sort of conventional
fish-and-chip-shop fry,
but I'm hoping this garlic mayo
is gonna kick it up a gear.
- [Ju] It's really...it's
really, really, really lemony.
You can really taste the
lemon coming through,
and the tempura is like
extremely, extremely thin.
It's very, like, light crisp to it,
but I think that there's
such moisture in the fish
that that's really, really
the overwhelming texture
that comes through.
- The fish is like, it's like butter.
It really kinda just dissolves
in your mouth almost,
and it has quite a lot of richness to it,
I think, the bream in comparison
to maybe the cod that we've had earlier.
The taste of the fish
is really, really good.
Oh, wow!
- Yeah!
- Yeah.
- I kind of don't miss tartar sauce now.
I think this is a really
lovely, lovely buttery taste
to go with the buttery
texture of the fish.
- I think that's the key.
It's so buttery. It's really rich.
It's almost like a garlic butter.
- Yeah, the garlic butter
with the really, really buttery fish,
and then these are actually
lighter than they look.
They look like it's quite
a thick texture to that,
but it's not.
I think that for the
quality of the texture
and the size of the portion,
this seems very, very reasonable.
Also, we're in a slightly
more upmarket, nice restaurant
rather than being
somewhere that, you know,
can effectively wrap your chips
up in a piece of newspaper
and casually give it to you.
This is more of a fine dining experience,
which I'd expect to pay
a little bit more for.
- And also this whole
sustainability approach,
which they've taken, is really great,
and you obviously end up paying
a little bit more for that
but worthwhile because the
end product is really good.
Now we move on to our next stop,
which is Poppie's in Central London.
Now, Poppie's has three
locations in Central London.
It's got a little bit of a
reputation for being touristy,
but it's not all bad.
- It's actually got quite
a nice history behind it.
It was started in 1952 by
Pops, who started as a teenager
wrapping up fish and chips
in copies of newspaper,
so, like, feeling a little bit
of a traditional vibe here,
but obviously because it is a chain,
will that affect the quality?
So this is a regular-size cod at Poppie's.
As you see, we've got an
absolutely massive amount of chips
and quite like an
achievable-size cod, I feel.
- Yeah, I mean, we're
reaching the point in the day
where I'm already getting quite full,
so it's nice to see that the
cod isn't too ridiculous.
- This is like quite light,
quite skimpy chips, I would say.
They're chippy chips, but they don't look
like kinda overly golden,
like overly brown.
We were a little bit confused
as to whether this was
battered or breaded cod
because it's such a light
and actually quite bumpy
texture to the batter.
I mean, it's battered cod,
but I guess we'll find out
what it's gonna taste like.
Ooh, that's crunchy batter.
- I would probably say this is,
the fish probably has the least taste
of any ones that we've tried today.
- Yeah.
Well, I know that all of their fish
comes fresh each day
from Billingsgate Market,
so it's just definitely the
same sort of supply fish
that we've seen before.
It's as light as well.
It's just not as much of a
fishy-ness to it, I would say.
- Yeah, there's just not
a lot of flavor coming through from that.
It's not in an unpleasant way, you know.
The batter's good. It lets
the batter shine a little bit.
Yeah, let's give these chips a try.
Yeah, these very much fit my idea
of a classic chippy chip.
You do get, maybe a little bit underdone
compared to other ones
that we've had today.
You don't get quite as
much crunch on the outside,
but the inside, you really
do get a lovely potato-y,
fried potato-y flavor, and
it's nice and fluffy as well.
- Yeah, very, very
fluffy and then in parts
you can see a little bit of skin on.
It's kind of like that roughness of them.
That's a classic chippy chip.
You're looking for a little bit of skin,
little tiny bit of crunch,
but mostly it's all about the
quality of the potato inside.
We move on to our final stop,
fine dining seafood
restaurant Bonnie Gull.
- [Harry] So what you're looking at now
is Bonnie Gull's take on
classic fish and chips.
So what we have is a
beer-battered haddock.
We have chips, which are
cooked in beef dripping,
and we have a homemade tartar
sauce and mushy peas as well.
It looks incredible.
Ju, what are your thoughts?
- Well, it almost just
looks like too good to eat.
It's just like a work of art on a plate.
It's just, I don't even know how they get
the fish to stand up
like that in the batter,
very, very mesmerizing.
I'm actually really looking
forward to trying this.
- [Harry] Look at that snap!
- Really buttery, really
melt-in-the-mouth texture
on the inside, but just
the batter is just,
I could just eat that batter.
Just have a snack pocket of that batter
and just snack on it all day long.
You know it's good when the
chip also has that crunch sound.
- Little bit.
That was really fluffy on the inside.
Yeah, I think that gives it more like a,
like you say, a roast potato vibe
that you'd expect with a roast dinner.
- Everything on this plate
is encased in something wonderful.
So the fish is encased
in this amazing batter,
the potatoes are encased
in this really, really great crispiness.
It's almost like little
joys hidden inside joys.
- So here we are.
We've had our five fish and chips.
We've had some time to think
about what our favorite was,
and now we're outside
Tower Bridge in London,
and we're ready to give you our answer.
- It's time to reveal our
favorite, should we go on three?
- On three.
- OK, one.
Two.
Three.
Bonnie Gull.
- Golden Chippy.
- Aww.
- We disagreed.
- Yeah, we can't actually
decide on one together then.
Why did you pick Golden Chippy?
- For me, Golden Chippy took the crown
because it was just the
quintessential chip shop experience.
In terms of the food, where you get
that flaky fish, crispy
batter, chunky chips,
and for me, yeah, it was
just classic fish and chips.
- OK, I see your point.
I picked Bonnie Gull because the quality
and standard of the food
that we saw that day
was like so much better than
everything else that we tasted.
I just thought the batter was perfect
and the size of those chips,
like, who couldn't love them?
- So as hard as this is gonna be,
we weren't here to pick the best two.
We were here to pick the best
fish and chips in London.
Can I convince you to come over
to the side of Golden Chippy?
- OK, I can be convinced
to go over to Golden Chippy
only because I think
that as a fish and chips,
proper English fish-and-chips experience,
it gives you that in a way
that fine dining at Bonnie Gull doesn't.
So I think in terms of
like all-around food,
plus the proper authentic experience,
OK, OK, I'm gonna go for Golden Chippy.
I can move over to Golden Chippy,
but Bonnie Gull was delicious.
