I like fish, and I have never been to England, but I have tried fish and chips at several English restaurants around the world recommended to me by English friends.
I have always been disappointed in the fish.
It is bland, overly breaded, and very oily. The only flavor is in the tartar sauce.
It seems as though it is more than 50% oil and breading.
Is that the way English fish and chips are supposed to be ?
Ah - no. Fish and chips should be battered, not breaded. And most people prefer salt and vinegar (and ketchup) to Tartare sauce.
However, I don’t really like UK fish and chips, either - I don’t much like cod or haddock as a fish. In fact, in NZ when I grew up, the normal fish was lemon-fish (basically, shark caught as by-catch), and I still prefer the firm flesh and taste of that. But NZ Hoki is pretty good, and Red Snapper is the best (but expensive).
My mistake in my wording. The fish and chips that I have tried have been overly battered, and seem to be 50% or more batter and oil.
The ones that I tried today were served with tartar sauce, but other times served with salt and vinegar.
The batter is certainly thicker than you would get on, say, tempura, but it certainly shouldn’t be 50% of the dish. The fish should be chunky - cod or haddock. The fish isn’t spiced or seasoned, so I can’t say if that’s why you find the fish bland, but cod and haddock, when fresh and plump, are gorgeous fish. Perhaps you weren’t served these, or were served inferior frozen versions which would certainly strip the flavour from the fish. I would always be highly suspicious of an ‘english’ restaurant that isn’t in England.
Traditionally, the fish and chips would be wrapped in newspaper, which soaks up much of the oil.
Obviously we have no idea of what you ate was what you would get if you visited the UK.
But I do now feel really hungry.
I have tried Fish ‘n’ Chips in both the North and South of England, and have found the batter on the fish is usually too thick and claggy. I think the love of F’n’C is down to enough people actually enjoying their fish encased in oily, stodgy crap - so it sounds like your English theme restaurants may be spot on.
I expect there are ‘artisan’ Fish ‘n’ Chips available in the UK now - in London and Brighton I’d wager - but most outlets are bastions of traditional awful British dining.
Fish tends to be quite a light flavoured flesh - if the batter is too doughy, the oil too cool or the old is old, you probably won’t get a great result. The fillet should be significant though - you want a nice crusty outer, but a decent amount of fish inside.
Best F&C I had was at Mt Eden Fish Supply in Auckland NZ - hand-dipped, Heineken-beer-battered fresh snapper, wrapped up in newspaper. Ah-mazing.
Also, Fish and Chips really needs to be eaten with mushy peas.
I find Fish and Chips can vary quite a lot, depending on where you buy them. It often comes down to the quality of the fish and the crispness of the batter. Salt and Vinegar is definitely required.
I generally find when I start eating a portion, I really enjoy them, but by the time I’ve finished, I don’t really want to have them again any time soon
I prefer haddock, though it’s not easy to find out here. The default fish all my life has been cod. Here in the PNW, it’s Alaskan cod. In California, it was Icelandic cod. My local options, in restaurants, are cod or halibut. Some places also offer salmon.
When I had fish and chips in England, the batter was thin and oily. Most places in California the first half of my life were similar, but I found the batter better in California than in England… until I started going to Ye Olde King’s Head in Santa Monica. Their batter is very thick, but it is also very airy and crunchy. I didn’t find it at all, and it seemed to be made for soaking up lots of vinegar. It’s the best I’ve had anywhere. I’ve almost duplicated the batter at home, but the SO prefers thinner batter. Either way, my fish and chips are better than any I’ve had in restaurants – with the exception of Ye Olde King’s Head. (One local place is almost as good as mine, but it’s cheaper to make them at home.)
God, I miss that shop so much. I’ve lived in the UK for nearly 7 years and the fish and chips in New Zealand is far superior!
There is no accounting for taste and I guess if the OP’s English friends recommended places that serve crap fish 'n chips, they like crap fish 'n chips.
However good fish 'n chips is an absolute joy and it’s easy to find in Australia and was equally easy to find when I lived in England.
Sure the batter is thicker than tempura but, cooked properly, it is crisp and cooked right through. If the oil is hot enough it isn’t oily at all. Years ago it was hard to find good places, it required trial and error, but now you just look on the web. Sydney, Sydney , London.
OK, here’s what YOKH offers. Pic 1, Pic 2.
You look at the first picture and think, ‘My god! That’s a thick batter!’ But the second picture shows that there’s a good chunk of fish in there. (Note: Order the Queen Size – one piece of fish – as the King Size is a lot of food!) Yes, the batter is thick, but you can see how light and crispy it is.
Again, I do like a lot of vinegar. Maybe that’s why I like YOKH’s f’n’c so much. The batter soaks up vinegar, where at other places the vinegar just flows right off.
We get a lot of icelandic cod in the UK as well. For a while British cod was hard to come by as stocks were over fished and therefore restrictive quotas were imposed on fishermen. Cod is coming back to strength as a result.
In the UK, depending on your location, some places also serve battered plaice, rock salmon (which is actually a kind of small shark) or, increasingly, pollack, which is deemed more sustainable than cod (though that is changing). Cod and haddock are the default though.
Add me to the list of people who vastly prefers everybody else’s version of F&C over that served in Britain.
This just might be another reason the “national dish” has changed from fish & chips to doner kebab. 
There was a small-chain f&c place in California that was run by a Japanese family. Maybe it was their leaning or just a “California cuisine” choice, but the fish was prepared closer to good tempura than traditional there’s-fish-somewhere-in-here batter. I loved it.
The best f&c I’ve ever had was on Gibraltar, though, which is kind of like part of England stuck in the 1950s.
One year when I was 11/12-ish, I was on a youth camp on a small island in the Hauraki Gulf out of Auckland. My mate and I got up at about 6am one morning, took our rods and walked out to the point of the bay - at low tide there was a rock at the point the bay dropped into deeper water. We could cast into the deep water, and we hooked a couple of kahawai. You have to bleed kahawai and cook it fresh to get the best eating, so we took them back to camp and gave them to Cookie (the cook), and went off to our tents.
When breakfast rolled around, everyone else had porridge or cereal and toast, and we had fish and chips - crisp batter and gloriously sweet fish. Utterly worth the early start to the day. I wish I had the batter recipe - Cookie used a heat-activated baking powder for his damper and batter and suchlike - it meant we could take premixed stuff on hikes and cook damper and pikelets (drop scones) on an open fire for lunch.
Of course, the fish you catch is always the best fish to eat, but there wasn’t that much I’ve had since to beat it. For the rest of the camp, we couldn’t get out on the rock due to the tide, but one day a leader took a canoe and rod out and caught maybe 100 fish, for fish and chips that night for everyone.
In Australia we love our Flake, basically shark deep fried. Hot oil produces a lighter and less oily batter, a lot of places don’t keep their oil hot especially when they are busy.
I love a piece of flake but also barramundi is served at one of my local fns shops, mmmmm.
Also I have about 10 shops within a five minute drive so competition is fierce! (oh I live by the bay in a holiday area, lots of day trippers etc having fish and chips bu the water)
Do they make F&C tempura style (on the fish, not the chips)? That sounds awfully tasty. Not instead of traditional, but as it’s own thing.
I have seen this but it seems mainly limited to things like calamari, prawns etc
Does anyone have a recipe that an average Yank could make? Difficulty: the fish will almost certainly have been purchased frozen.
Tempura is totally limited in my experience to “calamari, prawns etc”. I’m just wondering if it works (well) on fish fillets on the order of F&C fish-sized fish.