GB Fish and Chips

"Cornish," said the girl.

"No other kind?"

"No."

"Curry? Pork and gravy?"

"No."

"Cornish, then. With crisps. What kind do you have?"

Salt and vinegar. Some weird kind of barbecue from the Walkers brand. I went with prawn, and they tasted like a cup of salty shrimp ramen dumped into a bag of potato chips and left to dry. Not bad, exactly, but also not exactly good.

In Tampa, I drank terrible, gritty espresso and chain-smoked cigarettes in the oppressive heat while I waited for what turned out to be my best-ever Cuban sandwich. At GB, I drank a bottle of Newcastle, nibbled prawn crisps and watched the unusual crowd — a couple of weekend bikers in full leathers, a family with two freckle-faced children, two twenty-somethings on a date, a hard-faced woman eating fried fish and trying to rub up against the bikers like a cat in heat. When my name was called, I went up to the counter and took my order from the hands of the cook who'd prepared it, then went back to my table, my beer, my people-watching, a line of red plastic baskets lined with fake newsprint and filled with food in front of me. Not being the patient sort, I tossed aside the little cup of tartar sauce, bathed my fish and chips in lemon and malt vinegar and dug straight in, burning my fingers, my lips, my tongue.

While the fish fry might not have been the best ever, it was the best I've found in Denver: sticks of flaky cod cut off the fillet, jacketed in a perfect, crisp, crumbling batter (which reportedly took Stokeld years to get right), scalded by the heat of the fryer and served in generous, greasy portions over a mound of proper, thick-cut chips fried the way chips are supposed to be fried — hard and fast in animal fat. These chips were the slow country cousin of the more urbane pomme frite, what Americans were copying when we started serving steak fries: crisp on the outside, burned on the ends, mealy in the middle, and perfectly suited to being drenched in malt vinegar and used medicinally for the speedy absorption of alcohol.

The pastie is seriously historic comfort food — what a Cornish rock farmer or Welsh miner took to work as a midday snack. GB's version was like a shepherd's pie turned inside out, a British calzone full of cubed potatoes, gently spiced ground beef, carrots and peas. It was decent and dull — which means it tasted exactly like it was supposed to. Kudos to GB for accuracy, if not inventiveness. (On a return visit, I learned that the kitchen had originally made several kinds of pasties — chicken, curry, cheese-and-onion — but when no one ordered them had pretty much stopped.)

And then there were the bangers and mash — two beautiful, fat, English sausages, blistered and split from the heat of the flat grill, laid atop a pile of soothing mashed potatoes topped with grilled onions and served with a small paper cup of hot Chinese mustard. That accompaniment was so weirdly appropriate, so fusion-y and British, it made me laugh. In a place like this, the details count: the right chips, the right crisps, a book on the history of Doc Martens propped at the end of the bar. The mustard was one of those little things that make a whole meal work.

I've returned to GB several times since that first visit, stopping by in the afternoon to watch soccer and eat sausage, showing up at nine with a few drinks in me to see how the fish and chips taste when eaten in their proper state (which would be after a few pints or a couple glasses of Irish dew). They tasted fantastic, hot and fresh from the fryer. (They degrade quickly once they start to cool.) I tried the fried prawns, which were almost as good as the cod; tried the pork pie, like a ground pork sausage, boiled and served in a tiny house made of pastry; never tried the tilapia (why bother?) or the scallops, because scallops are hard to keep fresh, and even I'm not that brave.