Cod is in the details when you crave fish and chips

When Ray Kroc introduced the McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish sandwich nationwide in 1963, he was just finding a new way to market one of the oldest “fast food” dishes in the world. The English had been buying take-away orders of fried fish and potatoes, often served wrapped in newspapers, since the early 19th century. There’s a reference to the dish in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, published in 1838.

Fish and chips have never enjoyed the same iconic status in the United States, and the dish’s popularity has traced a distinctly roller-coaster-like arc in landlocked Kansas City. Here, after all, “fresh fish” has usually meant catfish or maybe trout. Well into the 1970s, local menus that offered “seafood” used that suspect phrase as an umbrella description for catches that had been in dry dock for some time: shrimp that went from freezer to deep fryer, maybe a bit of sole thawed and poached.

The 1976 Menu Guide of Kansas City doesn’t list a single fish-and-chips dish on any of the 94 restaurant menus reproduced in the book. (Several restaurants, including the American and Jasper’s, did offer frogs’ legs, a delicacy that has definitely fallen out of favor over the last 35 years. You can still order them fried — with french fries — at the Savoy Grill, among a few other places.) That ’70s decade was, however, a boom time for fast-food fish and chips, served with only the most tenuous links to the British staple. The three leading fried-fish purveyors of the era — Long John Silver’s, Arthur Treacher’s Fish & Chips and Captain D’s — were all founded in 1969, at the end of a British-crazed decade (the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Carnaby Street, Twiggy, Vidal Sassoon). By the time compact discs began to replace records and cassettes, many of the chains’ franchises had sunk to a watery grave.

A more upscale version of fish and chips later became a fixture on pub menus, not least because it’s a relatively cheap and easy dish to prepare. The breaded fish fillet and the fries can be dumped in the same deep fryer as the mozzarella sticks and chicken fingers and “toasted” ravioli. Sometimes it tastes better than the deep-fried square of flash-frozen, prepackaged breaded pollock offered — with a half-slice of processed American cheese — at McDonald’s. And sometimes not. Either way, it’s not very good for you and isn’t supposed to be. Even the lightest crusts and least greasy mound of fries assault the arteries like a pirate ship.

It’s generally agreed that the best fish to use in this dish is flaky, mild-tasting cod. But cod — once a cheaper white fish — has become more expensive, thanks to aggressive overfishing in the Atlantic. So more and more chefs are using alternatives, such as cape capensis (also known as hake), fished off the coast of southwestern Africa. “What’s not to like about it?” says chef Michael Peterson, who likes the fact that cape capensis holds together better in the deep fryer and has more fat than cod. “A higher fat count means a more moist and flaky fried fish,” he says.

Peterson won’t take credit for the delicious fried fish served at Beer Kitchen, the Foundry and McCoy’s. The best-seller is the creation of chef Mark Kelpe, and it calls for some kind of house-brewed ale; Beer Kitchen’s batter uses McCoy’s Landing Light lager and also has bits of cilantro, which McCoy’s skips. At the Foundry, the fish has a touch of roasted garlic and parsley. In any of its incarnations, it’s a gloriously light and crunchy fried fish, greatly enhanced by the house-made “chips”: hand-cut Idaho russet-burbank spuds brined overnight in cold salt water and vinegar and never over-fried. Peterson’s malt-vinegar aioli complements fish and chip both.

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Booze also plays a major role in what may be the most expensive plate of fried fish and chips in the city: the $22 champagne-battered cod at the Gaslight Grill in Leawood. This isn’t just any old cod, mind you. It’s fresh from Georges Bank, a famous Cape Cod fishing area for 400 years. For all the fuss with the fish, though, the fries aren’t cut on-site — they’re just the standard frozen variety. At least the hoity-toity fish can be dipped in a house-made tartar sauce, flavored with chives. An additional $5 at Gaslight Grill lets diners upgrade their fish and chips with a battered diver scallop and a jumbo shrimp, adding up to the ritziest Captain D’s platter ever.

Of course, you could always just go to Captain D’s, where $5.29 gets you the Fish ‘n Fry Combo. At the faux “New England”-style outpost at 6308 Troost last week, my combo included two skinny battered pollock fillets, each about the width of a Dollar General hair comb; two hush puppies (the most boring and unnecessarily fried doughy balls ever created); and a mound of lukewarm fries, all served on a shiny black-plastic plate.

If that’s your bag, ask for it in a bag — to go. The Troost Captain D’s has an ambience best summed up in a single word: not. It’s not particularly friendly, not very clean (the place has aged badly over two decades), and not even really a bargain. And don’t get me started about anyplace that requires me to pump my own condiments into white paper cups. Even Oliver Twist didn’t have to do that.

After that, I needed a more traditional, English-style fish-and-chippery dinner. I figured I’d find it at Matt Poulton’s six-month-old Queen Lizzy’s Fish and Chips, in Lawrence. Poulton, a cheery native of Surrey, England, moved to this college town with his wife and decided that what it really needed was, he told me, “a proper fish-and-chip shop.” There are other dishes on the menu, including sausage rolls, sliders and battered chicken strips.

I walked into the two-story restaurant at 7:15 p.m. on a recent Friday, and the first thing I overheard was Poulton telling Nicholas, the bearded, skinny waiter on duty, that only a handful of fish orders remained. Without looking at the menu, I buttonholed Nicholas and laid claim to one of the in-demand dinners. Then I sat down at an uncomfortable window counter, took a sip of water and looked up as he switched off the neon “open” sign.

“I thought the restaurant stayed open until 10 tonight,” I said.

“When the fish is gone,” Nicholas said, “we’re closed.”

“During Lent?” I asked.

Nicholas looked at me quizzically. “It’s already Lent?”

Ninety percent of Poulton’s sales are fish and chips, which means that the restaurant closes immediately after the day’s last cod fillet plops into the fryer. Having eaten the fish and chips, I’m not sure I’d want anything else. The signature dish here is damn good. Poulton batters his generous hunks of cod in a mixture of egg, flour and Foster’s Southwick Ale. His fries, before frying, are hand-cut and brined in water, vinegar and what Poulton says is his own special seasoning mixture. The results are outstanding.

Poulton pushed a bowl of the traditional dish called “mushy peas” at me. I couldn’t take more than a taste — they were too, well, mushy.

“This is how the queens in England eat,” he said. The queens around here do it differently, but I’d send a footman back to Lawrence for more of Lizzy’s fish and chips.