Evening Standard
Jimi Famurewa hailed the Spanish-accented makeover of a derelict chippy, by Four Legs chef Ed McIroy (Plimsoll and the Compton Arms), as “both a justified candidate for opening of the year and a reminder of what a confident, singular and beguilingly weird restaurant city we have.”
Quite apart from the “rowdy, cross-cultural brilliance” of combining old and new, British and Spanish, “classically coded cooking” and a casual environment, the Tollington team have “also imported the continental belief that eating and drinking well, rather than being an expensive luxury, is an inalienable right”.
Jimi’s most memorable dish was a case in point: “Beef dripping in London chippies is a rarity these days but here it is put to spectacular use for chips bravas: fat, hand-cut potatoes, cooked to a perfect, sweet-edged and tallowy gold crisp, and slopped in a messy Rojigualda of housemade aioli and punchy, warm salsa brava. With apologies to justifiably aggrieved vegetarians, they really may be the best chips in London.”
Jimi Famurewa - 2024-07-14The Guardian
A fortnight after the Standard’s Jimi Famurewa heaped praise on what “may be the best chips in London”, Grace Dent upped the ante dramatically, hailing “without doubt the greatest chips I’ve ever eaten. Hands down the best. No quibbles.”
Warming to her theme, she vowed: “I shall talk of these chips on my deathbed – these hot, fresh, fat, crisp chips fried in beef dripping and served with a heroic dollop of homemade allioli and a mild, sweet, silky bravas sauce. These are chips that defy sharing. They have all the punch of a 1970s trip to Scarborough with Ferran Adrià in charge of the ketchup.”
Grace was already a big fan of The Plimsoll, an “impudently shabby old boozer” a mile away run by chef Ed McIlroy and his team. Their minimal conversion of an old-school 70s chippy into Tollingtons, a “tiny, wonky, Haringey-meets-San Sebastián pintxo bar” serving seriously good seafood, confirmed her view that McIlroy and co are “the British food world’s biggest trailblazers”. “Comfy it ain’t”, though: you may well end up eating while standing with the throng on the pavement outside.
Grace Dent - 2024-07-28
