“You’ve got chips!” he howls, disdaining the necessity of a formal introduction. “Where d’you get chips?” At the chip shop, I say, pointing several yards to our right. And off he sets once more, before stopping and reversing again: “This chip shop,” he says “Italian is it?”
When you think about it, this small incident demonstrates a commitment to fast food found but rarely elsewhere; commitment not just in the dauntlessness of the man’s quest for carbohydrates but in his readiness to prolong the quest should the carbohydrates he locates be not of quite the right kind. This, you could say, is the Nitshill effect, an unswerving connoisseurship of fast and bad foods in most of their manifestations. The Nitshill effect could be seen in a more tangible form last week, however, when the area’s affinity with regrettable foodstuffs and sedentary lifestyles received some kind of formal recognition. More people from the area estimate themselves to be overweight than those in any other area of our country, prompting the Kensington-based market research company CACI to single out Nitshill as the fat capital of Scotland, certainly in terms of how those who live there see themselves.
From looking at its daily menu, you realise that while Nitshill may not be twinned with anywhere it does seem to have a suicide pact with the wobbly fatlands of middle-America. And just as these were investigated by Morgan Spurlock in the documentary Super Size Me, in which the subject was metabolically imperilled by a strict month-long diet of products from the McDonald’s burger chain, I’m here to root around in the larder of Nitshill, with the mission of eating only as the locals eat and grazing where they graze.
Tipping the scales at a whip-like 11½ stone, your correspondent has some way to go before intensive consumption of Nitshill’s customary bill of fare makes any similar inroad. However, this fact hardly renders a cook’s tour of 53 any more appealing. The epicentre, the Chinatown and Little Italy, of Nitshill’s culinary scene is the row of shops, or what a French gourmand might call la rangée des magasins, at the housing estate’s highest point. From here, the avid trencherman can navigate the gastric world in a flotilla of tin-foil containers; from Canton to Istanbul, via whichever benighted corner it was that gave rise to the King Rib supper.
The jewel in the crown, of course, is Remo’s chip shop, occupying the literal and metaphorical centre point of Nitshill’s main drag. When the shutters come up in the late afternoon, the place begins to exert a low-level magnetism on the patchy passing trade of mothers with pushchairs and drinkers from the pub over the road, now called the Cavendish but formerly known as the site of what the papers called “the Royal Oak bloodbath”, a gangland hit in 2004, in which two customers were shot dead by a masked gunman.
But first back a few hours to breakfast, which involves a visit to Tracey’s Fast Foods, an old-world snack bar next door to Chillies, a take-away establishment. From behind a small counter attached to a chiller display of soft drinks, Tracey and her trusty assistants dispense a steady stream of rolls and square sausage.“What’s the most popular order?” wonders Tracey as she serves a regular. “Everything, I think. The customers come in and say I’ll have that and that, they work their way through the menu.”
The decor is classically continental, with walls a muted mustard shade and several Woolworths watercolours of bosky Tuscan scenes. The bottles of brown and tomato sauce on the tables lend a functional touch to a haven of indulgence, an oasis amid the thunderous traffic of Nitshill road, lent an absorbing aspect by the views of gamblers smoking outside the branch of William Hill’s opposite.
Tracey’s menu is tempting, particularly if you happen to be a navvie of the late Victorian era; rolls with bacon, rolls with egg, rolls with bacon and egg and a choice of link and square sausage. But the choice must be between the all-day breakfast (sausage, egg, bacon, beans, potato scone and tea) at £2.25 or the belly buster, which is two sausages, two eggs, two potato scones, bacon and beans, with some black pudding thrown in for those who manage to retain their grip on consciousness.
The fundamental laws of capitalism seem mocked by the fact that the belly buster costs just 70p more than its puny, half-pint counterpart. All-day breakfasts are one of the trickiest dishes to get right, the consumer having specific preferences as to how the various constituent parts should be prepared. Tracey makes a respectably restrained and not wholly grease-soaked fist with hers but disregards the cardinal rule of the all-day breakfast, that the beans must never come into contact with the egg, a conjunction for which many people harbour something approaching a phobia. Sausages should always be deployed as a kind of breakwater.
A man at the next table, meanwhile, is embarking upon the belly buster, presumably having secured the week off work first. His plate is Nitshill’s own version of the super-sized meals consumed by Spurlock in the burger bars, where economies of scale conspire to raise the ceiling of greed at the most modest price possible.
My late lunch comes from Remo’s, another old-style establishment and one oblivious to such contemporary innovations as battered mushrooms or thin-crust pizza fired in wood-lined ovens, although happily that legendary cornerstone of the Scottish chip shop, the deep-fried Mars Bar, doesn’t make an appearance.
With a digestive system troubled only mildly by the all-day breakfast, I scan the fish and bovine nostril-related options and go for the king rib supper, consumed in my habitual spot against the side wall of Londis grocers.
