1 /5 F1 Ology: Fish & Chips Review – I’m Struggling to See the 4.7 Here…
How this place got a 4.7 on Google and 4.8 on Deliveroo honestly baffles me for a number of reasons. Maybe it was an off day, but if that’s an off day, I dread to see what a good one looks like.
Let’s start with the only two real positives!
1. Curry Sauce – very oily but good flavour. At £2.60, the price is fair and standard these days. It was just about acceptable, nothing memorable, but at least it was edible.
2. Saveloy – nicely cooked and just a standard fish and chip shop saveloy. At £3.40, I would say it’s slightly on the high side for what it is, and while it tasted okay, it wasn’t anything extraordinary or special.
But sadly, that’s where my compliments end.
The fish was a complete disappointment. The batter was oily, limp, soggy, and had no crisp at all. The cod itself was unusually sweet, which made me seriously doubt it was fresh. To me, it all tasted frozen or pre-prepared. For £15.90 for fish and chips, I expected far more care and quality than this.
The chips were just sad. Taste was fine or okay but the quality was poor. They lacked proper texture not crisp, not fluffy and overall it felt cheap for the price.
The onion rings were £3.70 for eight. Okay, that’s not outrageous, but they weren’t homemade, not even close. Clearly frozen, probably from a bag of 30 costing the shop around £1.20 or less. Not worth it at all.
When reviewing a takeaway, you also have to consider value for money, and here it’s lacking. Prices aren’t unusual for London, but for what you get, it’s not good. The curry sauce is fine but unremarkable. The fish is frankly inedible. The chips and onion rings are poor quality. The saveloy is the only decent item, but it’s nothing special for the price. Overall, the cost simply doesn’t match the experience.
Then there’s the 3-star hygiene rating, which really shows through in the food. Normally I check hygiene before ordering, but this time I did it the other way around, ordered first, checked later. When I saw a 3, I was already a bit apprehensive, but I wanted to be proven wrong. You don’t want to be proven right especially after spending £31! Sadly, I wasn’t. A lot of the online reviews are overly generous in my opinion or someone is playing a joke to get tourists to come here knowing the quality is bad?
Was it an off day? Possibly. But if this is an off day, I’d hate to see what a “good day” looks like. The quality overall was extremely poor, especially for an online order where care should arguably be even higher than in-store.
Half of the food went straight in the bin, and the other half I might let a friend finish off. If I had to give it a rating out of 5, I would struggle to give more than 1.5 stars that’s how bad it was.
Curry Sauce: 3/5
Chips: 1/5
Fish: 0/5
Onion Rings: 1/5
Saveloy: 3/5
Total Score: 8 out of 25
Average Score: 1.5/5