Good Friday is traditionally a busy day for the local restaurant scene, especially for fish and chips shops, but this year everything is up in the air.
Vicki Barbour is the granddaughter of Ches Barbour, the founder of Ches’s Fish and Chips.
She says Good Friday is typically a day where people are “lined up down the street,” and they would go through about 15,000 pounds of potatoes and 5,000 pounds of fish.
A meal of Fish n’ Chips at Ches’s. Photo via Vicki Barbour.
However, Barbour says this year will be different.
She told the VOCM Morning Show, “Normally on a Good Friday down on Freshwater Road alone, we would have at least 20 people working, but this year we are down to six of us—me, mom and dad, my sister, my aunt and my cousin.”
With such a limited crew, Barbour says they will work as much as they can.
“We don’t know when we’re going to run out of food—and if something happens to one of us, it’s going to put us in a snarl.”
Barbour says despite what’s happening in the world, they couldn’t let Good Friday come and go without service to some of their loyal customers.
“We will keep going as long as we have the food and the stamina.”
Eating Fish and Chips a Century-Old Tradition in NL, According to Local Folklorist
While fish on Good Friday is a long-standing Christian tradition, enjoying fish and chips is a relatively new practice in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Local folklorist Dale Jarvis says it only dates to the years following World War I.
He says it was Newfoundland soldiers who were introduced to fish and chips in the UK, developed a taste for it, and brought it back home with them.
Jarvis says one of the first fish and chips shops in the province was opened by a WWI veteran.
