California Food and Wine Blog

Posts Tagged ‘fish and chips’

We stopped at Quinlan’s for dinner to try their fish and chips for €11.95. Nathan ordered Haddock to compare against the Cod and found them very similar but the Haddock was a little more moist and fell apart easier. The batter was a little thicker and didn’t have much seasoning other than a little salt.

Flavor: 3.5/5

Value: 3/5

Service: 3/5

After an eventful day of pub crawling in Gallway we ended our evening on 10/15/2012 at The Dail Bar which came highly recommended by our hotel staff and on Foursquare.

Nathan ordered the Fish and Chips for €12.95 to try the traditional Irish fare vs our UK experience at the Hip Chip, and Jessica ordered the Vegetarian Special Quiche for about €9. The menu offered several options for vegetarian and gluten intolerant customers and shared all their local suppliers of meat and produce. Very friendly staff, but very difficult to tip – they tend to run quickly away.

Nathan enjoyed the light and flakey batter on the fish, but the overall flavor of the fish was sub-par to the Hip Chip. The mushy peas were an interesting experience; part of a tradition to serve with fish and chips, but I probably wouldn’t order it again especially not without a little more salt.  

The Vegetarian Quiche was good and filling with nice flavors.

Flavor: 3.5/5

Price: 2.5/5

Service: 4/5

After a little tour and whiskey tasting at Bushmills Distillery on 10/13/2012, we walked through the town around 3pm looking for our first taste of real Fish and Chips. We were sad to see so many vacant buildings and like many of the other tourists, actually went up to several pub doors just to walk away realizing it’d gone out of business some time ago. We walked past a few “take-away” only places and at first dismissed it, but then upon not finding any other options, settled on The Hip Chip.

We ordered two Cod and one Chip at about £4 each which seemed a bit steep for one piece of fish. Everything was cooked to order right in front of us and took about 15 minutes. The service was very friendly even through we could hardly understand through their accent and kept responding “huh?”

When we received our fish we suddenly realized we got quite an amazing deal for our money; each of us got about 1.5lb of fish in addition to a good helping of chips.

It may not look like much, but the fish was enourmous and very good. The batter was flaky and seasoned well much more than the standard salted seasoning. The fish tasted very fresh and wasn’t overpowered by the batter, although it did start feeling a bit heavy after about 1/3 of the fish, but that’s also because it was extremely filling.

Definitely set the bar high for our first European fish and chips experience!

Flavor: 4/5

Price: 5/5

Service: 4/5