Are these £33 crisps really worth it? SCARLETT DARGAN crunches the data By Scarlett Dargan For You Magazine Published: 03:01 EDT, 24 August 2024 | Updated: 03:01 EDT, 24 August 2024 e-mail View comments Toklas, a Mediterranean restaurant just off London ’s Strand, is nearly every food critic’s favourite hotspot. Regular guest Nigella Lawson says she leaves with a ‘smile in my heart’ whenever she visits; food writer Marina O’Loughlin has a ‘blazing infatuation’ with the place. The menu is a roll call of luxurious dishes: rabbit saltimbocca with Amalfi lemon; wild sea bass crudo; native lobster that travels from coast to plate within 15 hours.
Yet according to head chef Chris Shaw, ‘All anyone wants to talk about are the crisps.’ He is referring to Toklas’s homemade crisps, served as a £9 starter with mussel escabeche. ‘It’s only meant to be a snack before the meal,’ Shaw explains, ‘but I’ve lost count of the people who walk up after eating, say, wild sea bass, only to talk about how amazing the crisps are.
People, especially British people, love crisps.’ The chef is on to something. From restaurants to fancy department stores, bougie crisps are having a moment.
Oxfordshire foodie pub The Harcourt Arms serves homemade lattice crisps with its beef tartare. At swanky cocktail bar Seed Library in London’s Shoreditch, £15 cocktails come with Wotsits accompanied by caviar. Meanwhile, at Gordon Ramsay ’s Savoy Grill, executive head chef Arnaud Stevens has swapped the bread accompanying the £24 steak tartare starter for Torres black truffle crisps, which you can pick up in Selfridges for £4.
99 a 125g bag. ‘We tested 20 varieties of brands and flavours when creating the steak tartare dish,’ Stevens says, ‘and it was clear that Torres black truffle crisps were the best. Pairing them with tartare is the same as enjoying gaufrette potatoes with a venison tartare during game season.
It’s the perfect garnish, while adding texture and flavour.’ But £5 a bag is relatively mid-range in the new luxury-crisp market. Real aficionados opt for Bonilla a la Vista’s extra virgin olive oil and sea-salt crisps, sold at Fortnum & Mason plus a handful of artisan wine shops and cheesemongers.
Depending on the store, a tin can set you back £32.99 for 500g – equal to roughly 100 bags of Walkers salt and vinegar. The £9 crisp and mussel escabeche at Toklas What justifies the price? For starters, chef Shaw at Toklas explains, it’s the potatoes.
Bonilla crisps are made in the northern Spanish city of A Coruña, wherever possible using local Galician potatoes, which have the starch removed before frying – not the process with corner-shop crisps. Shaw does the same at Toklas, ‘otherwise the crisps don’t get crispy’: when it’s fried, starch goes soggy and turns brown. Bonilla even employs someone to examine (by tasting and snapping) the crispiness of each batch before the crisps make it into the tin.
Then there’s the oil. Regular crisps are fried in blends of sunflower and rapeseed – cheap but relatively flavourless, so they need to be enhanced with all sorts of additives. Fancy brands such as Bonilla and Torres use mild or extra virgin olive oil, which is much more expensive but lends sweet and fruity notes before you even move on to added flavours.
Olive oil is also better for you because it has heaps more vitamins and fewer chemicals than cheaper alternatives. As for flavours, gourmet crisps tend towards natural ingredients rather than the artificial kind made in a lab. The Torres black-truffle variety uses authentic dried black summer truffle shavings, priced at around £200 a kilogram.
Top-end brands use sea salt, which is less processed than the table salt that cheaper crisps are tossed in. Restaurant versions will often be made with fresh, rather than artificial, herbs, which is why the flavour is so much stronger. Toklas crisps feature dried oregano – a snack so delicious that one customer asked for ‘a bucket of them’ with their meal.
If you’re looking to up your crisp game, Torres and Bonilla are great places to start. Stevens also recommends Yorkshire Crisps (£35 for 12 bags; yorkshirecrisps.co.
uk ), again created with sea salt and natural seasoning but fried in sunflower oil to make them a bit more budget-friendly. Olive oil crisps are cheaper on the continent, so next time you’re in France, fill your suitcase with Stevens’s favourite, the ‘insanely good’ Brets pesto mozzarella crisps, made in Brittany (£3.25 a 125g bag plus shipping; my-french-grocery.
com ). Shaw agrees, saying that he hunts down Ruffles jamon crisps on Euro jaunts (or ifoodsuk.com; £5 per 150g plus shipping) because they’re pretty much as cheap as Walkers to us.
But he isn’t enough of a crisp snob to pay £33 for a tin of Bonilla crisps here. ‘When I’m at home,’ he says, ‘I just have Monster Munch.’ Share or comment on this article: Are these £33 crisps really worth it? SCARLETT DARGAN crunches the data e-mail Add comment More top stories.
