Harking back to national ‘dish’

Idon’t eat fish and chips so much anymore. At my place of work I dine from a deep fryer more than I ought to, so when I get a night off I tend to lust after a nice green salad or some stir-fried veges. But just because my current usage has petered out, it doesn’t mean I haven’t spent the preceding years working on my cholesterol like every other scumbag Kiwi bloke.

So I consider myself somewhat of an expert on the culinary experience that must be New Zealand’s national food.

What do foreigners make of fish and chips? What do they think when someone shows up with dinner and dumps it on the floor so we can eat with our hands from the pile?

We must look like a pack of hyenas feasting on a carcass.

I’ve always thought it’d be funny when overseas guests are present to remove the hands from the exercise and just eat off the pile with our faces – embrace the wild animal experience and blow Jo Foreigner’s mind.

I can just hear the David Attenborough commentary:

‘‘See the native Kiwi as he gets possessive of his item in the pile. He pulls it to the front and continues to graze on the chips before the group food is depleted…’’

Maybe I’m showing my class here. Maybe posh people politely eat off the pile with expensive silverware while discussing the polo.

Dairies have become chain stores and service stations are bright, clean and without a spanner in sight – owned by some distant multinational.

But the chip shop, the blessed chip shop, remains a small owner-operated business, cranking out an income for some hard-working immigrant one scoop at a time.

Last weekend, my wife and I were walking into town when we realised we hadn’t eaten dinner.

As my wife suffers from a condition known as aggressive hangriness, we nipped into the nearest chipper and grabbed a couple of fish and a scoop. Isn’t chance a fine thing?

I think we’ve found the best gosh-darn chip shop in town.

Cashmere Fish Supply sits nestled at the bottom of the Port Hills where Colombo St meets Cashmere Rd.

After ordering, I enquired if the place was new. ‘‘No, six years old,’’ the owner replied.

‘‘But the fryers are new, right?’’

‘‘No they’re also six years old. I just clean them twice a day.’’

Now my sister runs a commercial kitchen on our behalf and I know how much work goes into keeping a kitchen in tip-top shape.

All it takes is a couple of lazy shifts and the place can quickly get to being as greasy as ... well, really greasy.

And I’ve hung around hospitality auctions like a vulture and I know how gross plenty of people’s fryers are.

Of course you all know the saying: Give a man a fish and he’ll have a fish. Teach a man to fish and he’ll eventually end up with a spare wheel cover on his 4WD that says ‘‘gone fishing’’.

But give a man a deep fryer in which to cook fish and in no time at all it’ll be a greasy, disgusting mess that’ll make you question your eating choices.

Not at Cashmere Fish Supply – where the fish was fresh, the chips were the pure perfection that can only come from clean oil and an operator that cares, and the fryer and floor were so clean I wondered if perhaps we should just do away with the pretentions of eating off newsprint – save a few trees – and eat the pile of food straight off the goddamn floor.