Something fishy in Thorndon

Thorn­don has a long his­to­ry with greasies, includ­ing David Lange’s fish & chips brigade in 1980. I remem­ber buy­ing fish’n chips from that same store (where Cel­lar­vate is now, I believe) and eat­ing them on Par­lia­men­t’s lawn after a big legalise cannabis protest in high school (so I guess 1996?). Sad­ly that fish & chips shop closed down a while ago, and while it was rumoured the own­ers were run­ning the place near New World Chaf­fers, that is also sad­ly now closed as well.

Nat­u­ral­ly, Tinako­ri Vil­lage is far too civilised and twee to allow a take­away place to open, but Starfish by New World Thorn­don has reli­ably been turn­ing out crisp chips and fresh fish for a good num­ber of years (since Novem­ber 1998, accord­ing to Twit­ter). But this is Thorn­don, and a stan­dard fish’n chips shop is nev­er going to be enough. So we’ve got some good news.

Remem­ber how excit­ed every­one in Mount Vic­to­ria was when the Mt Vic Chip­pery opened in 2012? Final­ly fish’n chips had reached the sun­ny slopes! The Chip­pery has been doing so well that they’ve decid­ed to expand to the shady side of town as well. We attend­ed the open­ing last Mon­day (they’re open to the pub­lic from today — appar­ent­ly they received 11 orders in their first 15 min­utes of being open) and we liked what we saw.

The Thorn­don branch of  The Chip­pery is at 10 Mur­phy Street, which you may remem­ber from its pre­vi­ous incar­na­tion as Le Canard (I guess they’re just focussing on their duck truck now?) There is a chan­de­lier, because of course there is, because it’s Thorn­don, dar­ling. The beau­ti­ful bar is made from reclaimed wood from the old Whitcholls store.There are a cou­ple of high com­mu­nal tables and also lit­tle sets of tables and chairs — a cou­ple out on the pave­ment — so you can dine in if you choose. Excel­lent if you are one of the many pub­lic ser­vants in the area des­per­ate to escape your desk for half an hour at lunchtime.

At the open­ing we ate salmon ceviche on corn chips (deli­cious!) and pulled pork slid­ers (we imag­ine these to be the mini ver­sion of the pork burg­ers on the menu and avoid­ed the oys­ters which were no doubt deli­cious if you like that sort of thing. So this is the thing. You might think that Thorn­don already has a per­fect­ly good fish & chips shop in Starfish, which it does, but The Chip­pery has a much wider offer­ing. There’s  five kinds of chips, for starters, and six ways to have what­ev­er fish they have on the day, then things like grilled salmon, a seper­ate fry­er for gluten-free cook­ing, and fresh-made sal­ads avail­able too. It’s going to appeal to a dif­fer­ent audi­ence, and we imag­ine it will do very well. Hur­ray for diver­si­ty!

Oh and also — hur­ray for hav­ing a web­site that dis­plays loca­tions, open­ing times, con­tact details and a menu ALL ON ITS FRONT PAGE. Let that be an inspi­ra­tion to the rest of you.