Restaurants

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Garlic and parsley-crusted fries at Out of the Blue

10 Out of the Blue
The secret to the addictive shoestring fries at this lively Battersea joint is not New Zealander Michael Taylor’s careful faffing with rinsing, cutting, boiling and frying, but the pungent herby mixture he sprinkles on top. What’s more, it’s easy enough to try at home. First chop a bunch of parsley. Then remove the internal vein from a clove or two of garlic (that’s the bit that would give you the burps) and chop the rest finely. Mix with the parsley, being careful not to use too much garlic, and sprinkle it over the freshly fried chips (Taylor uses vegetable oil). You can also use this mixture on roast potatoes, he says. ‘I’ve tried to take this dish off the menu several times but people want it to stay. It is a good hangover cure.’ He reckons these fries are best served with red meat – a good rib-eye or sirloin, maybe some lamb – and béarnaise sauce.
Out of the Blue, 40 St John’s Hill, SW11 1SL (020 7207 8548) Clapham Junction rail.

9 Toff’s
The ‘F’ word (French fries) is banned at Toff’s in Muswell Hill, where even by Time Out standards they exercise an astonishing attention to detail in pursuit of the perfect chip. The potatoes, Maris Pipers, come exclusively from Titmus Farm in Lincolnshire. Although machine-peeled, the spuds’ eyes are removed, and the chips are cut, by hand. Toff’s prefers a thick size to keep the fat content of the chips low. They are rinsed thoroughly to wash out some of the starch and boiled in water for six minutes. Cooling is very important here. The cold chips going into 180C oil results in a crisp exterior and a soft interior not unlike the texture of mashed potato. Toff’s favours a high-quality refined groundnut oil. How are these perfect chips best served? They recommend chilli sauce.
Toff’s, 38 Muswell Hill Broadway, N10 3RT (020 8883 8656) Highgate tube then 43 or 134 bus. Feature continues

8 Grand Union Burger Bar NEW!
So decadently rich tasting are the chips at this new burger and cocktail bar that it’s a surprise to find co-owner Adam Marshall and his team had healthy eating on their minds when devising the vital chip element of their simple menu. High-quality Maris Pipers are hand-cut and peeled to a thickness of 12mm and rinsed thoroughly to remove as much starch as possible. Then they are boiled in heavily salted d water – not so unusual you may think, but aha! – this is a rather long process that cooks the chips 90 per cent of the way through. Time in the fryer, therefore, is comparatively brief and the high temperature means the chips absorb very little of the groundnut oil. You couldn’t say they’re as guilt-free as oven fries, but certainly a step in the healthy direction.
Grand Union Burger Bar & Cocktail Lounge, 53-79 Highgate Rd, NW5 1TL (020 7485 1837) Kentish Town tube/rail.

7 Sea Shell
Mashed and baked potatoes are on the menu at this Lisson Grove chippy, but the lovely chips deserve your custom. Crunchy out, soft in, they’re made from peeled, thick-cut Maris Pipers cooked just once in groundnut oil. A huge variety of excellent piscine options are offered, from garlic prawns and calamari to haddock and lemon sole goujons. The calorie-conscious can request their fish grilled rather than fried.
Sea Shell, 49-51 Lisson Grove, NW1 6UH (020 7224 9000) Marylebone tube/rail.

Simply delicious: chunky chips

6 Empress of India
Marks and Spencer’s advertising company would no doubt love the opportunity to sell the Empress of India’s chips and gravy. Because this isn’t just gravy. This is a veal jus, made from 20kg of veal bones roasted until dark. Meanwhile, chopped carrots, onion and celery are fried until soft and brown and flavoured with tomato paste. Red wine is poured in to help dissolve all the tasty caramelised cooking juices, then the lot is combined in a stockpot with water and left to simmer overnight before being strained and boiled again, until the jus has reduced to a sticky sauce consistency. The chips, by comparison, are light work. Large chipping potatoes with a low sugar content are hand-cut and double-fried in vegetable oil. Once combined, the result is marvellous. But then, this isn’t just a pub. This is a restaurant set in a pub and run by Tom and Ed Martin, owners of The Gun in Docklands. Which isn’t just a pub, but a former winner of Time Out Gastropub of the Year. Which isn’t just a highly regarded annual competition soon to be seen in these pages…
Empress of India, 130 Lauriston Rd, E9 7LH (020 8533 5123) Mile End tube then 277 bus.

5 Roundhouse Café
The skin, argues Mike Lucy of Company of Cooks, the catering experts behind the café at The Roundhouse, ‘not only tastes good but is the healthiest part of the potato’. It’s not just extra fibre you’re getting by eating the skin, but also a higher concentration of potassium and other nutrients.

At the Roundhouse Café, Maris Piper and Bintje are the preferred varieties and they always come from English farms. ‘My view is that as long as the potato is a recent crop and of the right texture for chipping, most of it goes right or wrong in the cooking,’ says Lucy.

Thinner than those of many eateries, but not quite skinny, the Roundhouse chips are rinsed in cold running water for five minutes or so, then drained before double-frying ‘in good, clean vegetable oil’. The final flourish is to drain them on kitchen paper, then sprinkle with sea salt.
Roundhouse Café, Chalk Farm Rd, NW1 8EH (0870 389 9920) Chalk Farm tube.

4 The Queen’s Pub and Dining Room
When is a chip fat? When is it chunky? And when is it a potato wedge? These are the weighty matters we’ve been debating for the best part of a fortnight at Time Out Towers. You might think a fat chip is thumb-sized, but whose thumb is doing the measuring? One conclusion: a width of 13mm or less is, we feel, what might be called a medium cut. Fat is 14mm-plus. Another thing we do know: the fabulous hand-cut chips at this gloriously Victorian pub and dining room in Crouch End are dangerously close to being classified as potato wedges, but without the skin. They are made using various potato varieties that are double-fried in vegetable oil so they’re crisp on the outside and an inviting shade of golden brown. Served perhaps alongside a lamb burger with beetroot and mozzarella, or with a rib-eye steak, they’re undoubtedly worth the three hours it will take you to find a parking space or get to Crouch End on the W7.
The Queen’s Pub and Dining Room, 26 Broadway Parade, N8 9DE (020 8340 2031) Finsbury park then W7 bus.

3 Hawksmoor
Serving chips in a pewter beaker lined with greaseproof paper reflects the enthusiasm for fun vintage glassware at this cocktail bar and steakhouse. Meat is supplied by prestige butcher The Ginger Pig and served in fat, juicy slabs. To accompany them, chef Khaled Alarab favours chips of a 13mm cut and a cooking process that involves boiling in salty water plus double-frying in vegetable oil. Béarnaise sauce is his essential accompaniment; you’ll probably want to add one of the fabulous cocktails. Alarab reckons there’s really only one potato for professionals to make chips with – Maris Pipers.
Hawksmoor, 157 Commercial St, E1 6BJ (020 7247 7392) Liverpool St tube/rail.

2 E Pellicci
‘Mama’ Maria Pellicci still presides over the vital chip making operation at this beloved Italian caffè. Set in a Grade II-listed building, and owned by the same family since 1990, E Pellicci is Bethnal Green’s vital source of egg and chips, beans and chips, and of course egg, bacon, chips and beans. These big, fat, hand-peeled and hand-cut specimens are crafted from Maris Pipers and double-fried in vegetable oil, which is changed regularly for optimum flavour. The result is a soft, melt-in-the mouth quality beneath a crisp exterior. Traditional condiments such as ketchup and vinegar, and these days your trendy mayonnaise, are the most popular with Pellicci’s loyal customers.
E Pellicci, 32 Bethnal Green Rd, E2 0AG (020 7739 4873) Bethnal Green tube or 8 bus.

Comptoir Gascon

1 Comptoir Gascon
THE BEST CHIPS IN LONDON!
‘I thought I’d gone to heaven,’ is how one of Time Out’s critics described her encounter with London’s poshest chips, and at £3.50, this heavenly encounter will set you back significantly less than, say, a champagne bath at the Portobello Hotel with Johnny Depp and Kate Moss.

Comptoir Gascon is the bistro, traiteur and pâtisserie owned by chef and chief flower arranger Pascal Aussignac and manager and wine-buff Vincent Labeyrie. It’s an accessible offshoot of their phenomenally successful fine dining restaurant Club Gascon opposite Smithfield Market. And appropriately for an eaterie specialising in the food of south-west France, Comptoir Gascon’s ‘home-made French fries’ are cooked in duck fat (graisse de canard), that luscious elixir that floods from the bird when it is roast, fried or attacked with a hairdryer (that’s a nifty trick used by chefs to make the skin go crisp like a Peking duck and yes, you can try it at home). But careful choice of fat is not the only bit of Gallic polish that Comptoir’s chef Julien Carlon adds to these chips magnifiques. The tatties also come from France (he’s using the Spunta variety at the moment), and are hand-cut 8-10cm long and 1cm square (un petit peu thicker than you might expect of better known French or ‘Freedom Fries’).

The final flourish is not simply salt or sea salt, but fleur de sel, ‘the flower of the salt’: moist, sticky, hand-harvested crystals with a greyish hue that appears thanks to the extra mineral content the salt acquires during the harvesting process. Eschewing the better known fleur de sel of Brittany, Comptoir Gascon loyally uses a variety from the Gironde.

So the good news is you don’t have to die to go to chip heaven. You don’t even have to go to south-west France. Just hop on a tube to Farringdon.
Comptoir Gascon, 61-63 Charterhouse St, EC1M 6HJ (020 7608 0851) Farringdon tube/rail.

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