There are certain meals that don’t ask anything of you – no deliberation over the menu, no performance of sophistication, no occasion required. Just good food, the right company, and somewhere to be afterward. Dinner at Gordon Ramsay Fish & Chips, tucked just off Times Square, was exactly that.
Jessica and I had tickets to The Lion King on Broadway that evening – spectacular, by the way, genuinely spectacular, do not let anyone talk you out of seeing it – and we needed something that would hit the spot without demanding too much time or ceremony. We found it here, in what I will confidently describe as the finest fish and chips in the immediate vicinity, and possibly well beyond it.
I’ll be direct: I went in prepared to be underwhelmed. Fish and chips is a dish that invites a certain reflexive skepticism, particularly from anyone who has made the pilgrimage to London expecting revelation and come away quietly disappointed. Because here’s the thing – and I say this without malice and with full awareness of what I’m inviting – fish and chips in London, as a general rule, is not good. It is starchy and heavy and frequently served with a confidence that the dish has not earned. The best version I’ve encountered anywhere was in Seattle, Washington.
Which is what made Gordon Ramsay Fish & Chips so disarming.
I could not make fun of it. I wanted to, in the way that you approach any Times Square restaurant bearing a celebrity chef’s name with a certain amount of ironic distance, half-expecting the brand’s marketing to be doing more work than the kitchen.
The fish was genuinely excellent – light batter, good heat from the fryer, the kind of crisp exterior that gives way to something tender and flaky rather than dense and greasy. Better than anything I’d eaten under this category in London.
And the place itself – let’s be clear about what this is and isn’t. This is not the Gordon Ramsay of Michelin stars and white tablecloths. There is no tasting menu, no sommelier, no carefully considered interior design moment. The fryer smoke hangs in the air with a certain lived-in permanence. The ice machine, last I checked, had opinions about whether it felt like working. None of that is a complaint. All of it is part of what makes it exactly right for what it is: a fun, unpretentious, deeply satisfying place to eat before a show, or after one, or for no reason at all beyond being hungry in Midtown and wanting something real.
Gordon Ramsey Fish and Chips
1500 Broadway Suite 105New York, New York 10036
