Come Fry With Me: chip-only restaurant with aviation theme opens in West End

Rosamund Urwin books her ticket to Come Fry With Me and meets the cabin crew behind London's first chip-only restaurant
Chips ahoy: owner Tiffany Plant is turning her love for fried potatoes into a restaurant (Picture: Matt Writtle)
Matt Writtle
Rosamund Urwin8 July 2015

Everyone thinks this is a bit mad,” Tiffany Plant admits about her chips-only restaurant. Come Fry With Me “champions the humble potato”: not so much “Do you want fries with that?” as “What do you want on your fries?” The restaurant, which will open in the autumn in Covent Garden, also has an aviation theme. Instead of a chit, customers receive personalised boarding passes to collect their orders; the Come Fry With Me food truck will have a mini-plane on its roof; staff will be dressed as cabin crew and the condiment stands are the trolleys which get pushed up the aisle.

Unsurprisingly, Plant is mad for chips: “I’ve always loved fries. Who doesn’t?” On childhood visits to the grandparents, the 24-year-old recalls her “nan’s homemade fries — the best in the world”. She started making them herself while at Exeter University, where she was studying economics. “Like many students I had quite a lot of free time, so I’d cook for my friends. Homemade fries were a speciality.”

But it was while dining out that she had her epiphany. “I remember the first time I had truffle and Parmesan fries.” She looks wistful, and my mouth waters. “I was thinking ‘this isn’t just a side dish; this could be a whole meal’. I love the gourmet twist — putting fries centre stage.”

After university, she worked for two years for a foreign finance firm in Mayfair, specialising in mergers and acquisitions. She quit this year to launch Come Fry With Me (“this is my baby now”) but there was an overlap period where she would be slaving away at her desk, then going home late to experiment with her friends, “fattening everyone up”. She recalls: “We’d eat a lot of these chips at midnight when I’d be getting back from the office, and I’d come into work with oil burns on my arms, after being slightly tired at the frier.”

All in the spud: a promotional shot for Come Fry With Me
Press Shot

At home, she started experimenting, sampling all the different oils and potatoes. So what is the perfect fry? “Everyone’s is different but people want a golden fry — crispy on the outside, fluffy on the inside,” she says. “A lot of that comes from the type of potato you use, the oil, how many times it is cooked. You know if it’s triple-cooked then it’ll be more crispy and golden.” She favours Maris Pipers.

Fries flavours will include the purist’s “naked” fries, bacon and cheese, steak and stilton, pesto chicken and Marmite. Marmite? “Obviously you have Marmite crisps. You have all these different flavours of crisps; why can’t you have all these flavours of chips too? I remember when I was young being at an event where we were served potatoes cooked in Marmite — that was one of the first things I thought about.”

Predictably, she falls into the “love it” camp on Marmite. But how does she get the potatoes to pick up the flavour? “They [Marmite-maker Unilever] make a powder which is the flavouring that’s used on the crisps. Basically, anything you can do with crisps, you can do with chips.”

Latest London food trends

1/9

Plant, who lives in Greenwich with her rabbit Tilly (not a fry fan), will also serve sweet potatoes, with cinnamon, chocolate, peanut butter and vanilla dips. “I love the idea of chips being a dessert.”

The advantage of specialising in chips is that they allow customers to demand their perfect fry — skin-on, skinny or gastro-chips.

The aviation theme came about because Plant’s travels inspired the dishes: “In Milan, they use truffle on everything, and the pesto chicken flavour is Italian-inspired. There’ll be a Mexican fajita vegetables flavour too — but I haven’t actually been there yet.”

Plant’s food truck — which has three friers inside and cookers for toppings — will launch at Clapham Foodies, which runs from July 24-26. It will enable her to spend the summer testing flavours before the restaurant opens. She’s looking into appearing on the South Bank too.

But in the era of an obesity epidemic, should we be chowing down on chips? “It’s everything in moderation — though I hope no one’s going to do a ‘supersize me’ experiment on Come Fry With Me,” she jokes. “I did look at the percentage of saturated fat in the different oils, though — we’re starting with rapeseed, which has only seven per cent. But people should pick the food they want.”

Plant is slim, despite the fries fixation. “I’ve been eating a lot of fries! But it’s down to exercise. Oh, and forcing other people to eat them too.”

Follow Going Out on Facebook and on Twitter @ESgoingout

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in