The Best Fish And Chips In London | Best Of The Best

It's June 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. So what makes great fish and chips? We're going to 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 really nice flavour. 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 going to look at price as well. Are there any tourist trap spots that are going to rip you off? So it's 7.30 in the morning and we are 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 the fish market since 97. We cook 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 isn't they? A lot of people come here as well for the haddock, where the poached haddock and the poached eggs. Thank you. 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 almost just like this wonderful circular display which I'm absolutely loving. There's a lot of salad and red onion, some coleslaw on the plate. The overbearing thing on this plate though is 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 like a flaky fish like that. Also they don'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 and hopefully the fish inside is going to taste really good. Chip chip. It's a really good chip. It's a good chip. It's a good chip. It's not greasy it's just 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 will 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 that if it's a fish and chip shop chip but it tastes good. It's okay I think we need to try the fish. We do need to try the fish. I'm going to grab my fork. The taste of the actual fish inside of what's extremely like light floury batter is unbelievably good. That's really good fish. It's flaky which is again one of our criteria that we're looking for just kind of almost like falls apart and melts in your mouth. Really well seasoned. This is um it's just really lovely quality fish. I think you can just taste the freshness like it hasn't traveled you know it's just come like straight here in the morning probably arrived here like four o'clock in the morning and then we're eating it like seven eight o'clock. So this cost £10 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. Next we travel to the Golden Chippy in southeast London which is the number one 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 the humans. I ended up being surgeon of the fish. Golden Chippy have been open for 15 years. I started it from scratch but these hens been playing with fish for 42 years now. With the secret recipe of the butter 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 butter 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 like visibly crispy and the chips as well. These are like proper chip shop chips. We've got that kind of that 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. This is like so unbelievably smooth and just like a really really nice sort of like fish flow texture. This is absolutely melting my mouth. This is worthy of the first oh my cod of the day. No oh you stole my pun. Oh haddock you've got some of your own puns Harry. The batter is extremely crispy um it's living up to it lives up to how it looks um and you really get that nice texture of the contrast of textures between the crisp of the batter and the flaky soft melt-in-the-mouth fish it's really really good. So we saw them preparing these chips from scratch out the back which is great because you know they're not just buying in a frozen thing this is like a freshly made freshly peeled potato. Taste potato which is always good for chippy chips like normally the chippy chips you might be a little bit too greasy but this is just like the taste of the potato inside it's obviously coming through. Also they fry it and it's just the same oil as the fish so I'm getting like almost a little fishy taste from it but the whole. 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 flavouring them and doing a more new school take. We predominantly use tempura batter because it allows us to be consistently creative and infuse different flavours with our fresh fish so we are bringing a new school kind of vibe to fish and chips something that's cool and quite exciting. So we are at our third location this is Hook in Camden and we've just been given some garlic truffle mayo, some seaweed salted chips, nice little wedge of lemon and this lovely piece of sea green with basil and lemon tempura. It smells amazing 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 that this garlic mayo is gonna kick it up a gear. It's really um it's really really really lemony like you can really taste the lemon coming through um and the 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 like that's really really the overwhelming texture that comes through. The fish is like it's like butter it really kind of just dissolves in your mouth and has like quite a lot of richness to it I think the bream in comparison to the maybe the cod that we've had earlier um 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 really lovely like 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 it's a garlic butter with a really really buttery fish and then um then these are actually lighter than they look like so they look like it's quite like a thick like texture to that but it's not. I think that like for the quality of the texture and like the size of the portion like this seems very very reasonable also we're in a slightly more like upmarket like nice restaurant rather than being somewhere that you know can effectively like wrap your chips up in a piece of newspaper and casually give it to you like 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 uh is really great and obviously you 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 Poppy's in central London. Now Poppy'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 um but obviously because it is a chain will that affect the quality? So this is a regular size uh cod at Poppy's you see we've got an absolutely a massive amount of chips and quite like a 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 like quite kind of skimpy chips I would say like they're chippy chips but they don't look like kind of overly golden like overly brown um and the we were a little bit confused whether this was battered or breaded cod because it's like it's such a like light and actually quite like bumpy texture to the batter that I mean it's battered cod but I guess we'll find out what it's going to taste like. Oh 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 I know that all of their fish comes fresh each day from Billingsgate market so this is definitely like the same sort of supply fish that we've seen before um it's it's as light as well um there's just not as much of fishiness to it I would say. Yeah there's not a lot of flavour coming through from that not in an unpleasant way you know the batter is 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 like a classic chippy chip you do get maybe a little bit underdone compared to one of the 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 flavour and it is nice and fluffy as well. Yeah very very fluffy and then in parts you can see a little bit of skin on I kind of like that roughness of them like that's a classic chippy chip you're looking for a little bit of skin a 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. 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. What are your thoughts? Well it almost just looks like two good teas 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 um very very mesmerizing I'm actually really looking forward to trying this. Look at that snap. Really buttery really melt-in-the-mouth texture on the inside but um but just the batter is just I could just eat that the 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 down a little bit that was really fluffy on the inside yeah I think that gives it more of like a like say a roast potato vibe that you'd expect with your roast dinner. Everything on this plate is like encased in something wonderful so like the fish is encased in this amazing batter the potatoes are encased in this 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. Okay one two three body gold. Golden chippy. Yeah we can't actually decide on one together then um why did you pick golden chippy? For me golden chippy took the crown because it was just like 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. Okay I see your point I picked bonnie gold 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 going to 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? Okay 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 it gives you that in a way that fine dining at bonnie gold doesn't so I think in terms of like all-round food plus the proper authentic experience okay okay I'm gonna go for golden chippy I can move over to golden chippy but bonnie gold was delicious.