Thursday 25 October 2007

Fish redeems itself

We had fush and chups again for dinner. It's been at least a month or two since we last had any, and I have been loathe to go back to the fish shop after our last feed there.

They must have been having a bad night on our last visit, as the feed tonight was pretty good. It was not the best battered fish that I have ever had, but it was by no means the worst.

I did have some pretty lousy fish and chips in town not long ago. I went to a pub called Equilibrium for lunch with a work colleague one Friday afternoon. It's a nice looking place, being on the ground floor of the brand new World Square building. It's also a large pub - you could pack the inhabitants of half a large company in there and no one would be rubbing elbows with anyone else. That meant it was easy to find a table, even though the place was busy.

My fish turned out to be elongated fish fingers. I was expecting a whole fillet of fish in one piece, but the chef obviously had other ideas and sliced the fillet into fingers about 3/4 of an inch wide. The upshot was that after being fried, they were almost completely devoid of moisture. The idea of putting batter around a fish is to keep it moist, but there has to be a sufficient quantity of fish inside the batter for it to have enough water content to not dry out during the time it takes for the batter to fry. Chef got his sums wrong. The batter was crispy, but so was the fish.

The chips were fairly ordinary as well. Not happy at paying $15 or whatever it was for that meal. It was not terrible, but it did not entice me to come back for more. I suppose chef thought he was "putting a new spin" on an old dish, and that if he didn't put a new spin on it, people wouldn't eat it.

Here's a news flash - people won't eat it if it doesn't taste good or if it is one step away from being dried fish flakes.

That's the thing that I hate about these flash new pubs. They think they need flash new food to go with them. How about providing good food, rather than flash food?

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