Hi Nicki,
Firstly our apologies that you had a negative experience when you ordered food from us. And secondly, thanks for sharing your feedback. Interestingly, you have pointed out the biggest drawback of serving fish and chips, which is that they just DO NOT “keep” very well. Ideally, they should come straight out of the fryer, be left in the basket to drain off oil, put on your plate and popped into your mouth. The longer the time between the food exiting the fryer and entering your mouth, the worse shape it’s going to be in. And therein lies the perennial problem a takeaway faces: the moment we wrap the food in the traditional paper parcel, it starts steaming inside. As the trapped steam inside the fish builds up, it turns the crisp batter into a soggy mess. The fish itself becomes tasteless because it’s literally become watered down. As the steam inside each chip starts escaping from its core and on to the outside, it coats it with condensation which makes it shrivelled, wet and limp. If the parcel has been sitting around for about 10 minutes waiting to be picked up, I personally would be turned right off as soon as I opened it up and found the disgusting contents. In this regard, I always say that I’d rather the customer waits 5 minutes for their food than their food waits 1 minute for them.
We make our own chips, as you may be aware, and process up to 1000 kg of spuds every week. That’s a LOT of chips, you’ll agree. They are peeled and cut by machines, so there is minimal variations in shape and size of the chips itself (even though there is huge variation in the shape and size of potatoes). They are thick cut (15mm as opposed the industry standard of 13mm)which means they absorb less oil, we use Agia variety thru the year as far as possible (golden yellow and ideal for chips)and use rice bran oil which is one of the Heart Foundation’s recommended oils for deep frying due to its unusually high smoke point and its light texture. We filter our oil every night and change it regularly. We have been trained to follow The Chip Group’s deep frying techniques….some of the reasons we won the award for Auckland’s Best Chips for 2009 & 2010.
But none of the above means a thing when an order has been delayed in being picked up and the customer is unhappy with the food he or she paid for.
We’ve been running this takeaway for the last 5 1/2 years. On weekend evenings, between 5 pm and 8 pm, we process an average of about 80 orders, big and small from walk-in customers as well as orders on the phone. Not the easiest thing to accurately predict when an order will be ready, but believe me, we try our hardest to please everyone. On numerous occasions, we have had people who walk in to order, ask how long it will be and leave because they’ve been told there’s a 30 or 40 minute wait and they are in a hurry. Others patiently take a seat and wait. Half way thru their long wait, they look up and see a long row of food parcels for phone orders waiting to be picked up, very often they get irate and tell us perhaps it’s time we changed our approach to order taking and give walk in customers preference over phoned in orders from people who can’t be bothered to be on time. Many times, they ask for their money back and leave, because of this perceived injustice or flaw in the way we run our business.
All of the above notwithstanding, I would sincerely like to make it up to you as we don’t like to see a single unhappy customer if we can help it. So we would really appreciate it if you come back and give us another try. One request though: let’s avoid the phone; pls come in and order, sit back on one of leather sofas and flick thru one of our outdated magazines (!) and wait to pick up your food. I am confident it will be well worth the effort.

Hi, I’m one of the owners of The Chip Shop, the good-looking Indian lady that Criss, refers to as “flirty”. Thank you Fran, another reviewer, for pointing out that this gentleman needs to get a life. I myself could not have expressed that sentiment quite so politely!!! Both Trevor, my partner and I, are known locally as the friendliest of people and it is appalling that being jovial and conversational to your customers can be so grossly misinterpreted as a lewd invitation to get personal. I suppose it takes all kinds, and believe me, we’ve had a fair few in our four years in the business; luckily for us, the majority have been really great people…the kind that make our 12-hours-a-day, 6-days-a-week work routine a pleasure. Thanks to everyone for the encouragement and support. I guess we must be doing something right after all aye?