Speaking of crispy. Do you prefer your chips to be crispy and cruchy or soft an mushy?
There's this one pub that does the mushy chips with their own spices that is to die for. You get it a lot that people go there, and then order just the chips, nothing else.
To me, they need to be a combination of the both, which is what makes them a bit tricky to get right. To me, they should be crispy enough to crunch when you bite into them, but as light and fluffy as possible on the inside. I guess this is achieved by picking the right potato and double cooking to create surfaces to crisp up, a bit like making roast potatoes.
I'm not really sure what you mean by mushy chips.
Onion vinegar on my chips and yes curry sauce.
Especially good chips when they have just come out of the fryer.
My parents used have two fish and chip shops way back in the 1990s. Glad they got out of the trade when they did. There are just too many in our area now. Counted at least 5 within a 4 mile radius of each other. Another sector of the fast food market which are just cutting each other's throats, especially with fish prices now.
Onion vinegar as in vinegar that's been used to pickle onions? I like the sound of this, but unfortunately I only have silverskin onions and I can't see white vinegar doing it. It's got to be proper malt vinegar for me, so I order vinegar free and put it on at home so that I don't run the risk of getting non-brewed condiment on my chips. It also saves the vinegar making the chips soggy. I remember seeing Heston atomising vinegar for chip shop chips, which seems like a really good idea to me, but I haven't taken it to that extent. I'm a fan of chips that retain the salt put on them / salt that's the right texture to adhere to the chips. It's mad to think how much salt over the years has been poured on top of chips only to roll off and make the bottom of the tray look like a Colombian toilet cistern. I'm a curry sauce fan too. For some reason the stuff you make at home never seems the same, so much against my tight nature, I stump up an insane amount for a tiny pot of sauce. It has to be on the side for dipping, I fail to see the logic in taking something that's considered better the crispier it is and purposely making it less crispy, like these weirdos who pour gravy into a Yorkshire pudding.
I'd say your parents did the right thing. A mate of mine's family had one, which seemed to make them a very nice living. They were always smart in having a point of difference that made people use them. In their early days, they were the only chippy to open late, so got all the post-pub trade (my mate's old man was an England U16 second row, so could cope with a few drunks), in the mid / late 90s, they were one of very few businesses locally to offer delivery. They also kept their menu up to date and diverse. It sounds mad to say now, but it was quite a thing in the early 90s for a chippy to offer pizzas and Southern Fried Chicken.
In my home town, there are probably fewer chippies than at any time in the last 50 years. In my home town, the pinch has come from a massive expansion in the range of different offerings in the marketplace. From memory, when I was growing up in the 80s, the only other takeaways competing with them were a couple of Chinese takeaways (both still trading, one under the same ownership). Over the course of the 90s, Indians, kebab shops, chicken shops and pizza places. The price of fish won't have helped as you say, but the margins are still pretty mouth watering as long as you can get sufficient turnover. It's interesting that you think that 5 within 4 miles is a lot, if Google Maps is to be believed, there are 9 within 4 miles of me (4 in town, 5 in near by villages), but I suspect it's missing a few.
Neon orange battered chips are top tier
That might just be a west midlands thing though
TIL that this is a thing. Less the turmeric, I think that this is what my preferred local chippy does and is why they're so good. Possibly not as heavy handed with the batter as some examples that Google threw up though.