Fish and Chips question

For some reason, that gave me a brilliant mental image of chippies scuttling down side streets, and tourists visiting on a chippy safari, “Shh, now don’t startle them. Remember, this is their natural habitat, and we’re the interlopers here.”

I’ve not even been drinking.
Maybe I should start.

The best recipe I have ever tried is the Cooks Illustratedversion. They par cook the chips in a microwave prior to frying and have a lot of corn starch and baking powder in the batter. If you have access to the actual article, read it, it delves a little deeper into why they do what they do.

CI also has another good method for making fries/chips (as long as you don’t need to make several batches of them) that yields a result similar to double frying. You just start the fries in cold oil, heat it up, and when they’re brown and crispy, they’re done. It works spectacularly well and is quick and easy. The only downside is if you need to do more than one batch. And it doesn’t absorb a bunch of oil, as you might think. ISTR they measured the oil and the method actually absorbed less oil than the regular frying method.