Still frying after a century, by Anna Rigby

An original contemporary newspaper feature.

At half past eleven on a wet Wednesday, half an hour before the fryers are even hot, there are already six people waiting outside Mancini’s on Market Street. One of them, a retired bus driver called Melvyn Grimbleby, has been coming here every Wednesday since 1961. ‘Haddock, chips, scraps and a bread bun,’ he says, before I can ask. ‘Same as my dad had.’

This month, Mancini’s celebrates its hundredth birthday, and the town of Thornley is celebrating with it. Bunting and balloons stretch across the street, the local primary school has painted a banner, and the mayor has promised to serve customers on Saturday, provided, as the owner puts it, ‘he doesn’t touch the batter’.

The owner is Lucia Mancini, great-granddaughter of Giuseppe Mancini, who arrived from a village near Naples in 1924 with very little English and a single copper frying pan. He sold chips from a handcart outside the mill gates for three years before he could afford the shop. That pan now hangs above the counter, polished to a glow. ‘It’s the only thing in here older than Melvyn,’ Lucia jokes, and Melvyn laughs louder than anyone.

In a hundred years, Mancini’s has outlived the mill, two cinemas, the railway station and almost every other shop on the street. It stayed open through the Second World War, when Giuseppe’s son kept the fryers going with whatever fat he could find. During the floods of 2007, it served free chips to rescue workers from an upstairs window. In 2020, when the town was in lockdown, Lucia delivered meals to elderly customers herself, sometimes forty a night.

Ask people what makes it special and you get the same answers. The batter, light and crisp, made to a recipe nobody outside the family has ever seen. The portions, which are, in one customer’s words, ‘a meal and a half for the price of one’. But above all, people talk about belonging. Couples who had their first date at the corner table come back for their anniversaries. A woman who now lives in Australia sends a card every Christmas addressed simply to ‘the chippy’.

Inside, the place has barely changed. The tiles are still green and cream, the menu board is still handwritten, and the radio is still tuned to the station it played in the 1980s, mostly because nobody can remember how to retune it.

At twelve o’clock exactly, Lucia flips the sign. The queue shuffles in out of the rain, and the first basket of chips goes into the fat with a roar. Melvyn takes his usual seat by the window. ‘Hundred years,’ he says, unwrapping his paper. ‘Here’s to the next hundred.’

Mancini’s chip shop is described as a much-loved part of the town. How does the writer try to show this?

You should comment on:

• what is said
• the use of language, tone and structure
• other ways the writer tries to show that Mancini’s is much loved

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