Ben Shewry's Hot Chip Hit List

Hot chips are all around us, not only because of the global ubiquity of a giant chain of restaurants hosted by a creepy clown, but also because of air fryers, food delivery services, the supermarket frozen aisle, pubs and family-owned takeaway shops, and us, Restaurants!

 It's time, though, that I drew your attention to the darker, uglier, less well known side of everyone's favourite salt, starch and oil delivery system. For I have conducted a years-long investigative expose of hot chips in restaurants: I call it Chipgate. So. Have you ever noticed that restaurant French fries often seem remarkably similar to the ones down the road at the gigantic fast-food chain? That's because, most likely, they are the f#&king same! In Australia, hardly any restaurants make their own chips. I'm not talking about fast-food joints, but actual reservation-only fancy restaurants.

 I grew up harvesting Rua potatoes from the raised beds in my grandmother Lois's garden. We'd scrub off the moist dirt and peel them in her hand-cranked 'rumbler' before cutting and frying them. Lois had inexhaustible patience with me, as I would make chips in her kitchen nearly every time I visited. In the early 90s, when I was a teenager, I worked as a bicycle mechanic at a bike shop next to a takeaway shop. The owners cut their own chips at a bench in the car park and twice-fried them long and hard in tallow until they were thick, stumpy, potato-flavoured barnacles, as crusty as treasures found in the briny deep. Every lunchtime I'd scamper next door for a brown paper bag of these gems, the fissures in their deep golden-brown surface the perfect place for the flecks of salt to nestle. Those, friends, were truly the times. And they're also the reasons why Attica has always made hand-cut chips from seasonal varieties of potatoes sourced from 'Spud Sisters' Kerri and Catherine, third-generation potato farmers in Millbrook, Victoria. I'm sure you wouldn't expect any less of us.