The Fish Sandwich, Dressed Up

Aug 22

For a lot of us, our introduction to a fish sandwich came through a drive-thru. Crispy fried fish, a soft steamed bun, a blob of tartar sauce, and, depending on where you ordered it, a half slice of cheese that may or may not have been centered on the sandwich. Nothing fancy was happening, and nothing needed to. The simplicity works.

That’s what I love about classics! A fish sandwich already knows what it came to do. So when I decided to make my own, I wasn’t interested in deconstructing it or serving tartar sauce as a foam on an enormous white plate. I wanted a fish sandwich. I just wanted mine to dress up and have somewhere important to be.

I beer-battered the fish with a cold Stella Artois, put it on a sweet, perfectly toasted brioche bun and I made the tartar sauce from scratch, of course. It was creamy, acidic and bright, still doing exactly what tartar sauce has always been hired to do, just in a cuter outfit. Then… things got slightly out of hand.

Black tobiko enters the dressing room and brought little pops of salty texture. The fries got parmigiana reggiano and summer truffle because salt. And apparently once I started dressing things up, nobody was going home in sweatpants. I even had a perfectly poured Stella Artois alongside it, and suddenly my humble fish sandwich had acquired a passport and and a first class flight across the pond!

Was it still a simple fish sandwich? Absolutely not. Let’s not lie to each other. But it was still unmistakably a fish sandwich, and that’s where elevating a classic gets interesting.

The goal isn’t to see how far you can move away from the original. It’s understanding what made the original work in the first place and then deciding where you have room to play dress up. Make the sauce yourself. Buy the higher quality bread. Add the “good” cheese, if you want to. Open the caviar IF it actually makes the bite better. Just be careful not to bury the dish underneath your creativity.