The Quest for Fish 'N' Chips

As of our departure from New Zealand for Australia, the fish ’n’ chips line-up looked like this:

Flying Squid, Dunedin: Good fish, excellent batter, very good chips, served in a chic brown paper bag.

Porky’s, Hokitika: Good fish, good batter (too thin: tends to fall of the fish before it gets to your lips), excellent chips (thick and crisp on the outside), served in stylish white paper tray.

While in Sydney we’ve visited three locations for fish ’n’ chips and had variable experiences. (Sara really experiences fish ’n’ chips vicariously through me, as she doesn’t like fish.) However, the road to good fish ’n’ chips has been as eventful as the actual eating of fried piscine delights. A recounting is worthwhile here.

We have found our guidebook to Sydney, published by “Lonely Planet” very helpful for many aspects of our visit (except telling us about the visa we were supposed to have; see an earlier entry for that debacle). It seemed reasonable, therefore, to follow the Lonely Planet’s advice on finding good fish ’n’ chips in Sydney. I even went so far as to mark (in pen, mind you) the locations of the Lonely Planet’s “Top 5 Fish ’N’ Chips” restaurants. Before we headed out for the first one, however, Sara had the foresight to check up on the price range for these restaurants, cited elsewhere in the guidebook. We did so and discovered that the main courses at these restaurants cost between $17 and $25. Fish ’n’ chips for $17? No way! Good call, Sara Jane—saved us from a big mistake. Fish ’n’ chips shouldn’t cost more than $10—and even then it better come with a glass of wine and a massage.

If Lonely Planet fails you, where do you go? The clear answer for us was to follow the example of a good friend who knows how to work the big system we call society: Kierstead. Keirstead’s method of finding the best places to shop, eat, and party is to enter the nearest five-star hotel and ask the concierge. If you can fake it like you belong there, he’ll think it’s his job to give you the information you want to the best of his ability.

So I swaggered into the Hotel Intercontinental Sydney, right past a cherry red Ferrari and up to the concierge desk. Sure, I wasn’t dressed like you’d expect someone to be dressed who’d just dropped $500 on a hotel room (of course, if I had just dropped $500 on a hotel room, I’d be calling the credit card company to report a stolen card). Then again, in this age of internet millionaires dressing casually, who’s to say I didn’t look like a paying guest?

I asked the concierge where to find good cheap fish ’n’ chips in downtown Sydney. He informed me that the best fish ’n’ chips was to be found at Doyle’s, a restaurant on Circular Quay, the central harbour of Sydney. Some alarm went off in the back of my mind about a restaurant that could afford to have property on Circular Quay serving fish ’n’ chips for less than $50, but I ignored it. Then again, maybe I had tipped this guy off by asking for “cheap” fish ’n’ chips. Did residents of the Hotel Intercontinental ever ask for anything “cheap”?

We decided to check it out. Sure enough, Doyle’s on Circular Quay charges $30 for fish ’n’ chips. By the look of the wine list, I don’t think $30 included a glass of it, and I didn’t see massages anywhere on the menu. Forget Doyle’s, and I think I’ll need some more coaching from Kierstead. Maybe I needed to sway my hips more.

This whole fiasco brought us to the clear and obvious choice: Quay Seafood. Positioned in the loud interchange between Circular Quay railway station and the public ferry wharves, Quay Seafood is a dingy little hole in the wall. It’s got an old-school neon sign that flickers enough to make you think it should be fixed but not enough to make you call the repair man. And it has fish ’n’ chips for $8. Perfect.

The chips were good, but not excellent. They lacked the intensity of potato flavour that I like in my chips, perhaps because they’d been in the freezer too long. Who knows. The fish was very good—mild flavour, the way I like it. The batter was too thin and kept falling off, which was disappointing. However Quay Seafood added a wedge of lemon to the dish, which hadn’t happened in New Zealand. Nice touch! Over all, very good.

Now that we knew the five-star hotels didn’t have the angle on good fish ’n’ chips, we started checking with the locals. The next hot tip we got was for a place that had won “Best Fish ’N’ Chips in Town” in the paper for the Manly area. (That’s right: Manly. It’s where Australian boys become Australian Men. Apparently one of the first explorers to reach Australia named the peninsula “Manly” because of the physique of the Aboriginals they found there.) The local didn’t know what the name of the place was, but we couldn’t miss it right there on Manly Beach.

And we didn’t. Sea King is a cute little fast-food joint that specializes in sea food. While Sara munched on a chicken burger from next door, I had fish that was quite good—not as mild as I like, but bearable—though the batter, once again, was too thin and fell off easily. The chips were very good, a little thicker than average and quite tasty. Once again, they garnished it with lemon—an Aussie thing, perhaps?—that gave a good touch to the fish. Well worth the 30-minute ferry trip out to Manly (and the $7.50 it costs).

Every beach enthusiast who comes to Sydney must go to Bondi (pronounced BON-dai, not BON-dee) Beach. It’s the quintessential Australian beach experience. Furthermore, there is a beautiful coastal walk that runs from Bondi south to Coogee Beach. Sara wanted to walk and I wanted another try at fish ’n’ chips, so we took the bus to Bondi and walked down to Coogee, where we found a little stand next to the beach called “Chish ‘N’ Fips.” They had burgers, chicken, and fish.

Good stuff here. The fish was mild but not bland, the batter was superb—thick enough to hold together but not so thick it was soggy—and the chips were quite good. I think it also helps any fish ’n’ chips experience to eat it next to crashing waves and defend it from threatening sea gulls.

Alas, tomorrow we leave for New Zealand again, so the Australian fish ’n’ chips adventure will have to end here. But it was tasty while it lasted.

~emrys