Review: Tasty Plaice, Grand Central Birmingham

On Sunday afternoon I happened to be in Birmingham town centre, in Grand Central, waiting on a train home. Since I hadn't eaten anything all day, I decided to get some food and try out one of the many eateries in and around the local vicinity. Unfortunately the place I was really interested in hasn't opened yet so, as it had been several months since the last time I had takeaway fish and chips, I settled on Tasty Plaice.

Whilst I do have to compliment them on their service, it was fast, friendly and fairly efficient, the food itself was definitely disappointing. The first thing I noticed was that, despite being quite busy and assumingly having a high turnover, a lot of the food appeared to have been sat in the heated display for some time. This is never a good thing, it points to poor management, high food wastage and generally means that everything will be over cooked.

Ignoring my initial misgivings, and hoping the food in the display was only there for display purposes, I decided to go for haddock, chips and curry sauce. The chips themselves were black country style, meaning they're battered, and whilst this isn't inherently a bad thing, when done well black country chips are absolutely lovely, these were not good. They were cold, greasy and tasteless, they had clearly been being kept warm for quite some time as any crispness was long gone and it left them unpleasantly soggy. The curry was the only hot thing on the meal, unfortunately warmth was all it had going for it, it was watery and almost completely tasteless. The fish, the thing I had been looking forward to most, was by far the biggest disappointment. Happily the fish did not come out of display, however, when I cut into it, it was a very small, thin piece of fish coated in a lot of heavy batter, which was both soggy from standing and hard from being overcooked. The batter was so cold, hard and greasy that it was almost inedible, I ended up cutting a large proportion of the batter off and throwing it away. Inside the fish hadn't fared much better, it was almost cold and very dry. The fish had so little of the flavour that you would normally associate with fresh, fried haddock that I honestly couldn't have told what type of fish I was eating, it just tasted old.

Needless to say I won't be making a return visit and, as much as I liked the service, I won't be able to recommend this place to anyone. It definitely was not worth the nearly £7 it cost me for one of the worst portions of fish and chips I've had in a long time, I've had much better fish and chips at half this price.