Fish and chips tacos blend two of my favorites – fish & chips and fish tacos – into one delicious handheld meal, complete with tartar sauce!

You guys know I love some fish tacos…they were one of the first recipes that I ever posted here and I recently rephotographed that post (because I sucked at photography and was using a not-so-hot camera back in 2011). But when Philip recently suggested fish & chips tacos I was looked at him in a whole new light. Why didn’t I think of that?

Because fish and chips are one of my very favorite things to eat…but I can’t think of too many things that can’t be made even better by putting them on a tortilla. Now, I’m not going to lie…just a few weeks before Philip suggested this, I had seen a fish & chips taco on Cooking and Beer, one of my favorite blogs….but Justine didn’t go completely tradish with her tacos, using sweet potato “chips”, spicy tartar sauce, and no malt vinegar…so we’ll say I’m paying her an homage and not copying.

As I’ve mentioned before, in my house, you canNOT have fish and chips without some good old stinky malt vinegar. My BFF used to make fun of me when we had fish & chips dates (we did that a lot) and I doused my fish with it, but I’ve brought her over to the dark side now (really I guess it’s just that her tastebuds have changed). Malt vinegar slaw seemed like the perfect way to include stinky feet vinegar on my tacos…and yes, yes it was.

With the malt vinegar slaw, a classic tartar sauce and perfectly crispy fish, these fish and chips tacos blend two of my favorites…tacos and fish & chips…seamlessly.

Click here to print the recipe for fish & chips tacos!

These fish & chips are everything you’d expect them to be…crispy, hot, and delicious. Don’t forget the tartar sauce and malt vinegar!

Fish & chips played a more substantial role in my life growing up than you might imagine.

Now, I wouldn’t say that fish & chips were like a life-changing thing for me, but I have quite a few great memories from my teenage and early adult years that involve fish & chips. I know that sounds weird. Let me explain.

I haven’t eaten at Shoney’s, Long John Silvers, or Captain D’s in years. However, when I was a teenager, for some reason my BFF Angie (still my BFF….we’ve known each other since kindergarten-1983, y’all-and have been best friends since 8th grade) and I thought that the most fun thing to do was drive my 1988 Chevy Beretta to the Shoney’s (the one on 153, long gone) and eat fish & chips. Once we forgot to tip our server (how does THAT happen?) and we felt like complete heels (we would have gone back to tip her but we were already in Soddy-Daisy by the time we realized it). Later, after the Shoney’s closed, we started going to Captain D’s. This makes me laugh so much now. Angie always ate tartar sauce and ketchup (she is famed for her love of ketchup) and made fun of me for dousing my fish with malt vinegar, which she declared smelled like feet. Also, my college roommate and I had an exam week ritual of going to Captain D’s and requesting extra crispies or whatever you call those little fried pieces of batter that come on your plate. We called it “eating a little food with our fat”.

I haven’t been to any of the above places in probably ten years. I still love fish & chips, though. Liberally soaked in malt vinegar. And while I never liked tartar sauce when I was younger, I do now, in the right context at least (not the right context: asking for tartar sauce with your salmon at Back Inn Café. I once heard a man at the table do this and ask the server not to tell the chef. I’ll never forget that.). A friend suggested a cucumber-dill tartar sauce, which she had tried at a restaurant. Sounded good to me! I know that tartar sauce is not a traditional British accompaniment for fish & chips, but a Facebook poll decided for me that I did indeed need to include tartar sauce recipes (I’ve included two).


Getting the recipe for fish & chips right took a while. I tried Alton Brown’s recipe and America’s Test Kitchen‘s recipe, using Newcastle Brown Ale (beer adds bubbles and lift to the batter) both times as a control. We ultimately decided that we liked Alton’s recipe a little better but I decided to shallow fry instead of deep frying because I hate deep frying. I also nixed the deep fried “chips” (fries to us here in the States, of course) in favor of my best baked fries recipe (because, see above. I hate deep frying!). Third try was  charm and here’s the final result!

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This garlicky shrimp scampi will make up for the disappointment you’ve felt over shrimp scampi in the past. Don’t even think about serving it with pasta.

I’ve noticed something about a lot of people.

They apparently like bland food.

Do you like bland food? I didn’t think so. I have a feeling that if you asked most people face-to-face if they like bland food, the answer would be unequivocally no. However, so many of the recipes that I make turn out….meh. Even recipes from my favorite food writers can have a tendency to fall a little flat.

One of my biggest issues? Garlic. Garlic. Garlic.

I recently made a recipe that included the words garlic butter in the title. I made it with high hopes for a mouth-searingly garlicky dinner and found that I could barely taste the garlic. I was disappointed, to say the least. I remember when I discovered my love for garlic. I worked at a small local bagel shop in college. The dehydrated garlic we put on our garlic and everything bagels was so strong in the shop that when I would leave for the day I would have to sit in my car and wait for the burning and watering caused by the fresh air hitting my eyes subsided. Man, I loved those bagels. And from then on, I loved garlic.

As I lamented the lack of garlic flavor in this dinner, I realized that a too-mild garlic flavor had been the culprit in many disappointing dishes, not least of which being shrimp scampi. I mean, I love the idea of shrimp scampi: shrimp, garlic, butter, white wine, lemon….what’s not to love?

I set out to perfect a great garlicky shrimp scampi and realized that there was not one but two problems with the way I’ve been making and serving shrimp scampi all these years: (1) not enough garlic-for two servings, four or five cloves was necessary to get the flavor right; and (2) I have been serving scampi over pasta, which was soaking up all the garlic flavor. Clearly I was doing this wrong, so I tried serving my über-amped-up garlicky shrimp scampi with warm a baguette and a side of vegetables. Turns out super garlicky shrimp scampi stands on its own. You don’t need pasta to be a filler.

If you make my garlicky shrimp scampi, I promise you’ll be happy with its garlicky essence (assuming you’re a garlic lover like me)!

Have you ever been so excited to try a new dish only to be disappointed by a lack of flavor in the finished product? I want to hear about it!

Lightly floured, sautéed in brown butter, and spritzed with lemon, flounder meuniere is a delicious way to serve fish to your family!

Why is it that so many people dislike fish?  I hear it so often. “Well, I don’t eat seafood, but anything else is fine.” “I don’t eat anything that swims.” “I only like fish sticks.” Or my personal favorite: “I only eat Filet-o-Fish from McDonald’s.”  Yes, one of my friends will only eat fish in “filet-o” form.  I can honestly say that I have never, not once in my life, eaten or even been tempted to eat a Filet-O-Fish sandwich (though I have made a version of it from Devin Alexander’s book Fast Food Fix, but it had all recognizable ingredients and I got to choose my own fish so that totally doesn’t count).  Anyway, you get the point.  I’d estimate that at least 50% of the people that I know don’t eat fish.

I’ve always liked fish, at least the “not extremely fishy” fish.  I like the delicate varieties, the fairly benign varieties.  Let’s just say….I’ve eaten a lot of tilapia in my life.  I don’t really eat sushi (though I’m not opposed to it and yes, I will eat the uncooked varieties….I just don’t know enough about it to be like “yeah, that’s really great sushi” hence the reason I’ve never done a review of a sushi restaurant).

Cooking fish, though…well, cooking fish is a whole different kind of proposition.  I don’t really remember the first time I ever cooked fish.  Actually, I don’t remember anything about it-what recipe I used, what type of fish, when it was…nothing.  I am sure I was freaked out by it, though.  I don’t know why, but somehow fish seems more daunting to cook that other types of meat.  I guess it’s the whole “undercook it and you may die of some horrible strain of food poisoning, overcook it by so much as a millisecond and it’s inedible” thing.  Except that it really isn’t so bad as all of that, and I moved past my Gorton’s phase pretty quickly.

The first time that I made flounder meuniere I was actually planning to make “sole meuniere” which is the only way I’d ever heard the term “meuniere” used.  Except that sole is flounder; who knew?  I recall standing in the fish section at Whole Foods, lamenting the fact that not a darn thing in that case said “sole”.  So I pulled out my iPhone and lo and behold: flounder is sole.  Well there you go.

That’s lucky for me, because the last time I checked catfish (which I don’t think would be the best meuniere) and flounder were the only varieties of mild white fish in the freezer at Publix that are U.S.-caught.  Seriously.  Don’t feel bad about buying frozen fish, by the way. Most of the fish that you buy that appears fresh (that is, it isn’t frozen when you buy it) has likely already been frozen and thawed.  Most of the time I just go straight for the freezer.

This is a great dish….the brown butter is just great because, well, everything is delicious with brown butter.  The lemon adds a sunny, light flavor.  Flounder is delicious….it tastes like fish but not fishy, if that makes sense.

If you like fish, make this flounder meuniere. 

Just be sure to lay the fillets in the hot butter in the pan away from you so you don’t end up with second-degree burns (okay, that’s an exaggeration but just barely) on your hand (I was much more careful this time).

This recipe is very slightly adapted from America’s Test Kitchen.  I tell you, they have all the answers.