Postcard from Norfolk - Fish and Chips

One of the holiday party has announced that they are on a mission to have fish and chips every day of the holiday.

Given the enthusiastic rapture that I was in yesterday as a result of the seafood platter at the White Horse (a dish that deserves capitalisation and so will henceforth be known as the Seafood Platter), and the secret ambition I am nurturing not just to have the Seafood Platter every day but, if at all possible, every meal, I am in no position to criticise what I now consider a sound and admirable moral choice.

Because if you are going to choose to have fish and chips every day, this is the place to do it.

Fish and chips on the Norfolk coast is a single meal option with a multitude of options and varieties.  Obviously, you have your sauces, but you also have side dishes.  Well, one side dish, mushy peas.  Simply remembering there are more fish than cod in the sea that taste astonishing when battered for your pleasure makes the possibilities if not limitless, then certainly enough to fill a week.

Me?  I go for cod and chips from French’s, the best fish and chipper in the world.

This, it appears, is hardly a secret.  The queue was, literally, out the door when I arrived.  However, thanks to the experienced team working the friars, it was a moving queue and, because we were all only ten minutes away from golden battered goodness, it was a good humoured one.

It’s not just the tourists who turn up to take away here, it’s the locals too.  What I love about the take away service is that fish and chips is, more than any other food, ideally suited to being a take-away product.

Most importantly, French’s serve their fish and chips in a cardboard container.  No polystyrene here, just good, honest paper-based flatware.  What’s more, they warp them in sheets of paper to keep them warm.  What’s even more, they bag them in paper bags or, more precisely given the amount of fish and chips I was picking up, sacks.  French’s must have a paper bill just below that of a mass-market tabloid.

The benefit of all this is twofold.  Firstly, it keeps everything toasty for the journey back to the caravan, without everything going soggy in the way that using unnatural, godless packaging makes it.  Secondly, it allows the aroma to drift gently up and around the interior of the car.  This is especially wonderful of a wet winter night when, with a warm bag of fish and chips in your lap, the interior of the car slowly becomes a vinegary fug, a different variety of the atmosphere that is normally only found under duvets; warm, welcoming, comforting.

Finally, of course, one has the sauce sachets and condiment packets.  One is treated like a grown up and trusted to sauce and season one’s own whips.  The question is, one sachet of red sauce, or ten?  The supposed answer may be found in the pages of the better guides to etiquette, the actual answer is; as many as one thinks is appropriate.  We don’t judge.

Postcard from Norfolk - Chips with a view

Pass the salt, and the gull repellant.

French’s fish and chips shop is the best fish and chipper in Norfolk and, if we’re talking pure fish and chipper, probably the best in the world (the fabulous ‘Café Piquante’ in Edinburgh is in a class all by itself, selling as it does the ‘Ladies Special’, chips with cheese and a glass of white wine!), certainly when it comes to taste.  And location, overlooking the Quay at Wells, diners can sit and watch the fishermen arrive and depart and the crabbers pace the edge of the Quay with line and bucket, considering no doubt if they would be better off just making a sandwich out of their bait.


The restaurant area is small, which matters not because the sea wall on the Quay forms al fresco seating for anyone who can’t find a seat in the shop and of course that special extra something that any meal has when consumed in the open air with an aggressive gull beadily eyeing your chips.

As well as the sea wall, seating abounds in North Norfolk.  It’s a beautiful spot with many views, meaning there is no shortage of benches bearing sweet little plaques explaining that such and such loved this view (sometimes of a lovely natural spot, on one occasion in the Buttlands in Wells, towards The Crown, bet he liked the view from the bar out to the bench even more but I guess it’s harder to have a small plaque erected in your memory in a pub, in all my years boozing I’ve only seen one).  Normally, if you notice such a memorial bench at all, you have a read, give a small sigh and move on.

Rather unusual to see not one but two benches bearing bouquets.  If a public bench is adorned at all, it is usually with a scarf or mitten that has been abandoned, but flowers are something new.  And touching.

Postcard from Norfolk - Cod wars? Or just chip rivalry?

It always struck me as odd that a single city could support two football clubs, and that the fans would choose one or the other when at heart it’s just eleven blokes and a ball and who the hell cares what colour top they are wearing. The exception is of course Glasgow where the decision is based on what religion you were indoctrinated into at an early age – Rangers or Celtic, which then determined what church you went to.

In Wells the rivalry is between the two quayfront fish and chips shops; French’s or Platten’s. Maybe rivalry is too strong a word, as at the end of the day choice may boil down to which has seating available if it’s raining. Platten’s is much larger inside than French’s, and has a more modern feel, some might like that but then again other prefer a more intimate setting and windows that can see steaming up as the weather outside makes sitting inside sucking on a chip seem like a terribly good idea. But this doesn’t explain the happy looking locals I kept encountering with their Platten’s fish and chip boxes, taking their take-away away, or taking it to an al fresco setting to enjoy.

The basic differences, as far as I can work it out, are this. French’s serve their fish and chips in a cardboard tray wrapped in paper. They also, and I declare an interest as a big fan and the holder of a French’s loyalty card, make the best fish and chips in the world, with traditional chunky battered fish. Platten’s serve fish and chips in a cardboard box, a bit like a smaller, taller, pizza box and their batter is smoother. Perfectly acceptable.

I like to think that there is some unwritten history here, that you’re ether a French’s man or a Platten’s man not because of your taste in battering techniques, but because of the side you took in the feud years ago where the daughter of one chip shop dynasty took up with the son of another and it all ended badly, possibly with a scuffle and a battered savaloy.

Or it may be some sort of religious thing, but I prefer to think that something happened in a traditional small town manner to establish fanatical loyalties. Mine was established the fist time I tried French’s fish and chips and assured with a card that means every tenth fish and chips is free.

Postcard from Norfolk - Fish and chip crisis

Norfolk in May is plump and green. Such succulence is quite a change from my normal visiting time of October, when it is less crowded, rates are off season and the hedgerows are thinner. Now, everything is in leaf, pumped up and big. This includes the tractors that roam the roads, pulling trailers of badly secured root vegetables ready to bounce onto your bonnet and put a dent in your metalwork and crimp in your day alike. The tractors are like rural caravans in their ability to create a tailback occasionally slowing the journey along the A road leading to passing the time with classic car games such as I spy. After three miles at twenty miles an hour following a tractor the most popular ‘I spy’ letter is cee.

The first night in Wells-next-the Sea is also the first night of the holiday and holiday rules apply, meaning that such high level decisions as ‘what shall we have for dinner’ are not the subject of prolonged consideration, debate and risk assessment but rather come supplied with an answer prepared in anticipation of such a moment: ‘fish and chips from French’s’.

In truth, fish and chips from French’s is a good meal decision at any time and actually a fairly good solution to any decision, up to and including ‘is it time to tell this person I love them, or is there something else I should be doing?’.

Rocking up at French’s, I was met with the sight of a chap standing by the door. Cooks standing by the door of their establishment is never a good sign, unless it is at the back door of the establishment and they are smoking a fag, in which case it is situation normal.

It was not situation normal. The family ahead of me turned away at the door, dad choking back rage, kids choking back tears, mum wanting to choke back Malibu. It’s never a happy sight when a family set on chips are denied same.

‘Sorry, we’re closed.’

I choked back emotion. The chap could see that what he had on his doorstep was his worst nightmare, a bloke who was not going to explode into violence but rather burst into wracking sobs. He tried to justify this gross violation of my human rights.

‘Sorry. We’re reopening again at eight, but we’ve got one hundred and fifty schoolkids to cater for and if we don’t shut, we won’t get the order done.’

This was, I conceded, fair enough. If you had been dragged around all day in the rain on an ‘educational’ trip that began and ended with a trip in a coach with a load of other kids smelling mostly of anorak bad hygiene, it would take a harder heart than mine to begrudge the kids a fish supper.

Of course, the wait made our anticipation even keener.

Eight o’clock on the dot I was walking through that front door, no queue, straight to the counter. French’s still do the best fish and chips in the world. One hundred and fifty school kids can’t be wrong.

Norfolk notes - food

Norfolk, which for so long had a reputation for inbreeding and not producing many mountaineers, now has a reputation for food. The great thing is that you can see so much of it, either eyeing you with mild curiosity from a field, or lying in an mussel bed, blissfully unaware of the existence of garlic. Norfolk is where you come if you want good food, be it fancy dining with proper cutlery and a large selection of glasses for the many wines that will come with the food, or from a roadside stall where you have to brush the dirt from your parsnips before cooking them.

Morston Hall is one of the fanciest restaurants on the coast, it must be posh because the owner is on television, but not over exposed. He has a cook book or two but as all the recipes probably start with 'begin with a young and tireless kitchen staff of no less than a dozen people' I'm not confident that I would be able to adapt to my style of cooking, which rather concentrates on mastering the right defrost setting on the microwave.

But dinner at Morston Hall is an event, and tremendous fun. There's one sitting and one menu, and they suggest what wine you want with it. It's even easier than setting the microwave. I understand that there are two vegetarian options; you can leave by either the front or back door.

The food was sublime, with the starter, pan-fried foai gras (spelling?) on a strip of duck breast with a red wine reduction sauce. What I loved about it, even more than the idea that some genius has at last produced red wine in a handy sauce form that will enliven any meal (fish fingers, bacon butties, all taste better with a red wine sauce), was that somebody thought that foai gras wasn't rich enough. No, what it really needs is to be pan-fried!

Each course was brought to the table by the excellent waiting staff, who then cleared their throat and began; 'so...' and then described the course. This was great, a mini lecture about my food. It was done with such charm that it actually added a lot to the experience.

So much so that it became a feature of the rest of the holiday. Every pic nice began with the ritual unscrewing of the top of the thermos flask and then one of us intoning; 'so...what we have here is a cheese sandwich on white bread, served with a garnish of crinkle cut salt and vinegar flavoured crisps, and to accompany we have flask tea. The tea has been marinading in the flask for about three hours now and should have that special flask tang, tannin with just a hint of alloy. Enjoy!'.

Actually, when you are cooking for others it's not a bad idea to tell them what they're having. I cooked for the family in the evening not just because it meant I could spend an hour on my own in the kitchen getting outside a bottle of decent red before dinner, but also because it relaxes me, it's a nice transition from spending the day walking on a beach and an evening poking the log fire. But it did mean that I was serving up meals that my family had not seen prepared and in retrospect they did ask every evening what was in it. Not because they don't trust me (I hope) but because they were curious. Next time, I shall start with 'so...' while serving up. This is especially important with guests, because if you are able to get to the word 'peanut' before one of your guests swells like a balloon and goes into anaphylactic shock, it can be as much a contribution to the success of the evening as choosing between Dido and Sade as background music.

The best fish and chips in Norfolk, and hence the best fish and chips in the world, is still French's. The fish comes off the boats bobbing a few feet from the front door of the shop and the potatoes probably come from the fields surrounding the area. The freshness must be the secret of the success, either that or they put just the right amount of heroin in the batter. Certainly there's nothing quite like eating fish and chips watching the boats that landed the catch at anchor a few feet away.

Because I'm that sort of person, I couldn't resist taking a photograph of the dish to immortalise it.


But then again what's so terribly wrong about that? Many a house has a still life of a bowl of fruit or a distressed looking game bird hanging over the mantle, so why not a fine study of fish and chips? There are, after al, people who earn a living taking photographs of food for magazines and recipe books. While this may not be as noble as, say, wildlife photography or as important as war photography, it is at least several rungs on the self respect ladder above 'food stylist', that is, the people who are essentially food fluffers. You may be able to do this and keep your self-respect, just, but I think the toughest job of all must be for the menus in fast food joints, where above the counter you can see deliciously plump burgers and crisp golden fries. Compare this with the actual contents of a styrofoam container when opened and you have a sense of disappointment and shock not normally encountered outside a screening of 'the crying game'.


One can also smile wryly at the van parked on the quay bearing the slogan 'DEFRA sucks, but they ain't fishermans friends'. A typically English protest about fishing quotas, a humorous dig at a notably crap government department. If this was France the van would be filled with petrol soaked goat shit, set on fire and driven into the lobby of the department's offices. As it's England the van is used to transport fish and crabs. The slogan used to be hand painted on the side of a van and it's good to see that when the bloke who owns the van traded up, he not only kept the slogan but got a professional sign writer to paint it. That's commitment.


Foodie find of the holiday was The Feathers at Holt. A sprawling pub, restaurant and hotel, it manages to hang on to it's charm by comprising of a warren of rooms and corridors and having the public bar on a couple of levels, the lower half for the drinkers for ease of access, the upper half for the diners who want to have something to soak up the alcohol. Lots of well done pub grub on the menu, the sort of traditional stuff you'd expect to see but also some surprises - like the cod in lime and tequila sauce that was sensational. Nothing quite like the simple addition of strong liquor to lift a fish out of the realms of the ordinary.

Postcard from Edinburgh - The ladies' special

Café Piccante in Edinburgh is quite a place. It has very good food, but that’s not why I love it. It does deep fried mars bar, but that’s not why I love it. It’s licensed, but that’s not it…okay, so it is a bit.

No, the reason that Cafe Piccante deserves to be visited and patronised by every right thinking person everywhere is that at the end of the many choices of food listed there on the board above the counter, is the ‘ladies' special’.

The ladies' special is chips and cheese and a glass of wine.

Let’s take those one at a time. Chips and cheese? Chips and cheese! Chips. And cheese. This I now know to be chips with grated cheese melted on top of it. I saw a lady come in, order this and then sit down and eat it with every indication of relish. Thinking about it, what’s so odd? In the wild West Midlands we love our chips and curry sauce (better for avoiding a hangover than not actually drinking), and in t’north they love their chips and gravy. Trust the classy Edinburgh crowd to come up with a development where you can actually add another solid…that then goes to a liquid state!

But it’s the glass of wine with the ladies special that really makes it for me. That touch of class that hints that you also need to be a wee bitty pished to really enjoy your chips and cheese.

The mans' special, by the way, was a burger and a bottle of beer. What’s so fucking special about that? I want my glass of wine!