Off The Hook

Starting out as a pop-up, as so many of the region’s best-loved brands did, Off The Hook is now a proper chippy, and you can even sit down and have your fill at one of a handful of tables, surrounded by octopus and seaweed wallpaper and fish scale-inspired blue and white tiles.

You can take away too, and there’s plenty of choice on both eat in and eat out menus; as the frontage says, it’s “fish and chips and so much more”. Let’s start with the fish and chips: the crispy fish is coated in a signature batter blend, the chips are cooked fresh and there’s a homemade tartare sauce option as well as mushy peas. Alternatively, you could have scampi, salmon or Thai fishcakes, or a fishfinger butty. There’s also “The Healthy Option”, which is baked teriyaki salmon with Asian slaw, tzatziki, salad and flatbread. There’s plenty of non-fish choice too: the gluten-free pakora-style halloumi and sweetcorn fritters, with delicate spice flavours coming through, are vegetarian, as are the chickpea falafel kebabs, with a vegan option if you ask. There’s a plant-based burger and vegan mushy pea fritters, and the vegan fish and chips, made using lightly marinated banana blossom, are getting quite a name for themselves. Veggie gravy and gluten-free batter can be requested, and coeliacs can rest assured that cross-contamination is avoided with a totally separate fryer, trays, utensils and hot box. Meat? They have it, from the Manc Mac burger, with double smashed beef patties, cheese, lettuce, pickle, onion and homemade burger sauce, to Grandad’s Sausages, both the olde English ring and the traditional pork, battered or unbattered, and apparently “perfect with a pile of crispy golden chips and a load of gravy”.

There’s also homemade pies – at the time of writing, you could choose from braised shin beef and Guinness gravy, confit chicken thighs, smoke bacon and creamed leeks, and cheese and onion, with extra mature Cheddar mornay sauce, but watch this space as more flavour combos are promised.

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