Hill’s in Middleton is an old fashioned chippy. The gravy is thick enough to stand a battered sausage up in, and people travel from miles around for a square slab of their homemade cheese and onion pie.
But it’s not without its quirks. Anyone who’s wondered what a chip barm would be like if it were battered and fried can come here and find out.
They take an oven bottom muffin, stuff it with chips and mushy peas, batter it, fry it and serve it up with a pot of gravy or curry sauce for dipping. It has sent them viral on social media on more than one occasion.
“If I post it on my Facebook page, people start coming in asking for it again,” says owner Gwen Hill. “The girls behind the counter will say ‘have you been posting again?’ I [posted] a battered sausage the other day, and the girls said ‘god, we did about 15 battered sausages, one after the other!”
Somehow, the muffin doesn’t go greasy, just warm and soft inside, with a crispy outer shell like it’s been covered in scraps. “They’re bangin’, them,” one regular customer told Manchester’s Finest, eyeing up our dinner.
John Hill and his wife Gwen have run the chippy for 22 years. John was a window cleaner for 20 years before that, a great job in the summer, but punishing in the winter. So when he found out a friend was selling a chip shop, he traded in the chammy leather for the chip fork.
“When I was at school, I always wanted to be a chef, but never went down that route,” he says. He never looked back, and soon Gwen, a childminder, joined him behind the fryers.
All their kids – Michael, Natalie and Katy – have worked at the chippy. Natalie still does, and Gwen’s brother has his own chip shop too, though as a child he nearly drowned in a barrel of water where the chips were being soaked. It clearly didn’t put him off.
It’s a chip shop dynasty, and what they don’t know about frying isn’t really worth knowing.
It’s not just battered barms that bring the queues – sometimes an hour on a weekend, and over two hours on Good Friday (‘like Christmas Day for chippies’, says Katy). They’re also famous for their cheese and onion pie, a square slab of pastry best enjoyed when it’s buried under a layer of gravy and mushy peas.
You can buy Holland’s famous pies at Hill’s too, of course, but those in the know go for the homemade, though they have a habit of selling out daily.
“It’s our biggest selling pie,” says John. “But for years, people just wouldn’t change. It had to be Holland’s. So when we started doing the homemade, it was a bit slow. Now it’s off the scale. It’s my recipe. But I can’t tell you what it is. The last one [I told], I had to kill!”
He says people have asked them to batter meat and potato pies before, but he tells them ‘this is Manchester, not Glasgow!’.
They love Middleton, and the community there. In the months after lockdown, when the cost of living crisis was beginning to bite, it broke their hearts to see so many families coming in when they started offering free food for kids. They soon realised that mums and dads were going hungry too, so they gave away as much food as they could afford. They fed more than 800 people in a few weeks.
“We started having to do shops for people,” says John. “You think that sort of thing doesn’t exist, but it does and it’s on your doorstep.”
John and Gwen still put back as much as they can, giving toys and presents out at Christmas.
“We’ve seen kids coming in when they were tiny, go to the big school, leave and then bringing their kids in,” says Gwen. “It’s really cute, that. It’s a really good community and they stick together.”
Hill’s will be offering buy one, get one free on fish and chips from Tuesday 3 December to Saturday 7th December on UberEats.
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