About Harvey's Restaurant: naturally wild fish and beef dripping chips.
Why do this?
The reason for starting this restaurant was very simple: we really love fish and chips yet hardly ever eat it. Why? It is a shame but the simple fact is that in most places it's just not very good. It had got to the point where it was just not worth bothering to try to find our favourite food, simply because of so many bad experiences and disappointments. (Of course this may just be a local, southern thing). A mediocre product tends to be the norm when ordering fish and chips in restaurants and pubs (often the fish is okay, sometimes good, but the chips are almost always a let-down in one way or another). Few takeaways seem to do a good job either, and we have had many truly awful experiences - soggy masses of batter stuck to paper, greasy bright orange batter drenched in MSG (chemical flavour enhancer), leathery chips (or the other extreme, soggy), claggy seed-oil aftertaste, the grinchy burned-plasticky taste from oil that has been over-used, excess of or simply poor quality salt, frying medium not being filtered regularly to remove impurities and carbonised deposits... and so on.
Does it have to be this way? Should we allow ourselves to become indifferent to our wonderful national dish being degraded?
These were the questions that prompted a multi-year voyage of discovery about the fish frying industry, doing the groundwork and learning about the process, doing much research on the way in a bid to see if (and how) it could be done better.
The conclusion was that regrettably in most places, whether restaurants, pubs or takeaways, consistency is a problem; sometimes it is good at some times in some places, and then again often not. Overall, the standard seems average at best and generally not predictable. Where the end product is not necessarily consistent the reasons for this or for the product simply being mediocre can of course vary from one place to another. We decided to pull the process apart and try to build it back up again, examining and testing rigorously as we went along.
Seed ("vegetable") oils.
Generally, the main problem seems to come down to not the quality of the raw ingredients as such, but the widespread use of seed oils and palm oil blends (used as they are significantly cheaper than beef dripping or other possible alternatives such as groundnut-oil and pure sunflower oil both of which used to be popular on account of their taste profile), but there is also frequent use of artificially flavour-enhanced batters which contain MSG and other additives such as E-number artificial colours, inappropriate or inadequate frying equipment, lack of maintenance or poor filtration of the frying medium, over-use of the frying medium (which can give that slightly-burned "acrylamide"-type aftertaste), and perhaps a lack of training and focus. This may be perhaps because fish and chips is often not the main focus for many establishments, and in the case of many take-aways, the owners are perhaps absent or are not really into the product, so as a result lose interest in keeping up standards. One of the main issues is over-use of oil, particularly seed oils (which are more prevalent). Guidelines can be vague, and to save money some operators will use their oil to the point of exhaustion and this translates as a bad aftertaste, while the degradation of the frying medium may have negative impacts on the health of those consuming food fried in it. The industry generally considers that more than 20 per cent TPM's (Total Polar Materials) in oil or fat is the point at which it should be discarded, however recent tests revealed that around 40 per cent of establishments selling volumes of deep fried food were over-using their oil beyond the point where it had broken down to an unacceptably poor level (i.e. more than 24 per cent TPMs present).
Technology and energy-efficiency in frying.
Another problem is throughput and recovery time. If a deep fryer is not powerful enough to get the temperature back up quickly after a lot of raw product has been put in to fry, then the timings and cooking process will go out of the window.
So we set about trying to work out how to get consistency and a repeatable product time and again, to simply focus on getting it right. Our frying range is a triple pan range with a large, wide, shallow dedicated fish pan and two deeper double-basket chip frying pans. Our frying range has triple filtration to remove bits from frying residue and isolate carbon deposits from the dripping. Microprocessor controls for temperature and cooking timings ensure consistency. The three pans between them hold around 100kg of beef fat. At capacity, the range is capable of frying around 100 servings of fish and chips per hour. The range is therefore over-engineered for the size of our restaurant, but that was intentional - consistency is only possible with a dedicated, heavy duty range with the best quality burners and precision manufacture. The hugely powerful 35kw gas burners and 94% pan energy-efficiency with computerised temperature control means that our range is capable of unstressed, consistent performance and very short recovery time (that is, the time it takes to get back up to temperature, following 5kg or more of raw, wet chips being lowered into the hot fat). This is essential to ensuring a predictable and consistent, crispy result, especially with chips.
Future plans.
For the time being our offering is dedicated very much to fish and chips, as we want to focus on doing this wonderful traditionally British food product as well as possible. However we do have plans to add a wider range of traditional food made on the premises using all British butter, British flour and beef fats and dripping products and an expanded range of our own fresh sauces, at a later date.