Editor’s note: Below is part of an occasional series, “The Dish.” Each article in the series features one menu item from an established Westport restaurant. The dishes are chosen for their originality, brashness or singularity. 

By Ken Valenti

WESTPORT–Sometimes good fish and chips are tricky to find – even if you know the place that serves them.

If you’ve been told, for instance, that Westfair Fish & Chips makes a top-tier version of the classic, you have been well informed. But if you haven’t been there – 1781 Post Road East – it may take a minute to find. The casual seafood place is at the Westfair Center retail row, across the street from Stop & Shop, but it’s tucked around back, behind the Golden Luxe Salon.

Once there, you can order a piece or two of golden, batter-fried cod on a bed of French fries, with a small potato salad, macaroni salad or coleslaw (your choice), on a red plastic tray. They are prime specimens of the North Atlantic comfort food, flaky, white and delicate.

Just be sure to bring cash. It’s all they take.

Fortunately, it doesn’t take that much. At $14.50 for two pieces of cod or a lunch special of $9.95 for one piece, plus the fries and side, it’s one of the more economical meals around. Considering the quality, it is high up on the bang-for-your-buck scale.

Its affordability makes sense, considering the Dickensian origin of the food favorite. Fried fish – later with “chipped” potatoes – became popular among Britain’s urban working class during the Industrial Revolution of the 1830s, says food history writer Mark Kurlansky in “Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World.” That was the era when Charles Dickens was writing about London’s underbelly in “Oliver Twist.”

That setting, of course, is far removed from current-day Westport. In Westfair Fish & Chips, the vibe is appropriately simple. Five wooden tables with two or four wooden chairs each. Order at the counter, get your drink from the drinks case and have a seat.

The place serves a whole array of seafood: shrimp, scallops, sole, a lobster roll and the Holy Trinity of clam chowders – New England, Manhattan and Rhode Island.

But cod comes with a long and storied history. New England folklore cited in Kurlansky’s book says cod was the fish Jesus multiplied to feed the masses. He talks of Vikings curing cod around the year 1000, while traveling the fish’s range from Norway to Iceland to Greenland to Newfoundland. The book suggests that a customs official and a merchant from Bristol, England, reached what is now North America, catching and curing cod, more than a decade before Christopher Columbus sailed from Spain. 

If you have any doubt about the fish’s significance, consider the Cod Wars. The series of clashes between Iceland and the United Kingdom over fishing grounds lasted almost two decades, from 1958 to 1976. The crux of it was that British fishing boats were trawling ever expanding waters over which Iceland claimed exclusive rights.

Things got nasty with both sides ramming each other’s vessels. The Icelandic Coast Guard even fashioned a trawling device that it could drag behind a vessel to snag and cut the line of a UK fishing boat’s trawl net, costing the British crew its entire catch. And the net.

The wars even caused one fatality (not counting the cod). An Icelandic engineer was electrocuted using a welder to repair damage left by a ramming from a British frigate when water poured into the compartment.

The hostilities ended when NATO urged Britain to back down.

But we digress.

At Westfair, you’ll probably need a condiment to perk up the mild taste of the fish. Heinz malt vinegar stands on the table, next to Frank’s RedHot sauce, plus salt and pepper. The fish and chips come with tartar sauce and a wedge of lemon.

If you must commit the highly discouraged act of overpowering your fried fish with ketchup, the plastic squeeze bottles of it are kept cold in the drinks cooler. Of course, that’s mainly for the chips. Or fries. Whatever you want to call them.

Ken Valenti

^{_{A career journalist and lifelong resident of the New York City region, Ken Valenti has enjoyed decades of reporting local, regional and national news in New York and Connecticut. Topics of special interest are development, the environment, Long Island Sound and transportation. When not reporting, he’s always on the lookout for the perfect coffee shop or used book sale.}}