Hull chippy earns a ‘good food’ award for fifth year running – but it’s more about community than accolades for owner

When you get people travelling from all over Yorkshire to sample your fare, you know you must be onto a good thing.

In the case of Cave Street Fisheries, fish and chips come with a serving of friendly conversation and genuine care for the customers, many of whom are regular faces at Number 2, Cave Street, Beverley Road. Business owner Carl McGlone said: “We encourage people to talk when they come in – you don’t know what they might be going through.

“I think it comes from the time of Covid, when you realised how much people needed to talk and how lonely many were. I’ve said previously, a fish and chip shop is the only place where you will get a homeless person next to a millionaire, stood in the same queue, and they will speak to each other.

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“It’s the only time, that one point when everyone is equal and we just treat everyone the same.” Cave Street chippy is in its 38th year of trading, beginning as a family business run by Carl and his father.

“Now it’s just me, and four members of staff, who are all long-serving. It feels like being in one big family.

“I’ve got one staff member who has just returned after being with me for 22 years, on and off, having children and so on. She has her own beauty salon but she misses being in the shop.”

Cave Street Fisheries has just been awarded a Good Food Award 2024/25 Blue Ribbon for the fifth year in a row. The Good Food organisation has been honouring “fantastic fish and chips” in one of its categories every November since 2002, basing the results on high customer ratings and votes.

Carl said: “It’s nice to have won the award. Last year I didn’t even publicise it as I thought a lot of businesses weren’t doing that well and I thought it wasn’t right; I just accepted it but didn’t put it on the wall.

“Last year we did the Englands Business Awards as well and won the Yorkshire round and got to the final. But winning awards isn’t the main thing for us. We’re not all about making profits – we’ve been doing this that long we don’t have to worry about that – it’s about making people happy.

“We have our regular local customers and people who come from all over Yorkshire. One customer comes every six weeks from Leicester - I assumed he had family in the area but no, he just comes for his fish and chips.”

Carl only opens Cave Street three days a week – Thursday to Saturday, 11.30am to 6.30pm – to enable him to pursue other activities in the community. “I’m working in a community kitchen at the moment doing lunch for 60 or 70 people,” he said.

Carl volunteers at Maxlife Youth Project based at Kingston Wesley Methodist Church, in Holderness Road. “As part of it there is MaxCafe, which runs a free lunch every Tuesday, and there is a youth club on Mondays and Wednesdays and a kids’ breakfast club on Saturdays.

“Maxlife is lucky to be very well supported by businesses in the area and it’s all local, which is the beauty of it. I’ve been doing this for a couple of years and it’s quite addictive, I feel it gives me more back than I give; it’s very rewarding.

“We look at it that it’s not charity, it’s helping the community.”