The Chippy King of Bolton has bigger fish to fry

Olympus Fish and Chip Restaurant in Bolton is a lot of different colours, but the one that stands out is orange. The red brick cladding on the 160-cover restaurant isn’t really red at all, but orange. The lampshades are orange, and through them the light comes out orange, making everything it touches orange too. The battered fish, like all battered fish, is orange, and the restaurant even has an orangery, and a great big grand piano with a piano-wing raised to reveal piano-innards: piano-orange. I arrive at 8.55, minutes before the coach is set to head off. Tasos Pattichis, the 65-year-old owner, is bouncing around his restaurant, flirting mechanically with the 30 or so white-haired ladies that make up most of his current clientele. Eventually he spies me by the till, an outlier among his usual demographic. “Are you coming on the tour?” he asks, eyes bright with mock bewilderment. “God help you.”

Tasos — a tall, grey Cypriot with permanent shirt and tie, and questioning, probing features — has owned and run Olympus Fish and Chips since its inception in 1988. His eyes and indeed his entire manner have a penetrating intensity to them as he scans his restaurant for the small tasks that, despite the significant team of staff at his disposal, he’s forever on the lookout for: customers in need of welcoming, coats in need of taking, dreg-bottomed teacups in need of collecting. 

In the 36 years since opening, he’s managed to turn the place into a Mecca for the local and not-so-local octogenarians — or, specifically, octogenariennes — who everywhere you look in the restaurant can be found, white wine in hand, white grandson in tow, squinting over such tailored menu headings as Pensioners’ Specials and Just What the Doctor Ordered. It’s plain to see how he does it: he’s there at the door to let them in, he’s there to put their coats back on as they’re leaving, he knows almost all his customers by name. “Hospitality. Pleasantness. That’s what grew the restaurant,” he tells me, though he has his concerns he might be overdoing it — “Maybe they think ‘Oh no, Tasos is coming!’”

Greek by family and birth, Tasos is ultimately a Boltonian. His parents left Cyprus for the town in 1959 when he was just nine months old, “despite the fact that I was crying and saying I want to stay.” Once in Bolton, his parents purchased a squinting tudor building, said to have once been one of Britain’s oldest pubs, and transformed it into Olympus Grill: a Greek-British restaurant that served Moussaka mains alongside 60s English classics — prawn cocktails, black forest gateau, Blue Nun and rosé in heart-shaped bottles. By the age of five, Tasos tells me, he was helping out at the restaurant collecting ash trays. By the age of 29 he had opened his own takeaway: Olympus Fish and Chips, an institution now so significant to the town that in 2021, Tasos was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Greater Manchester for his services to the high street (not the most credible establishment these days, admittedly).

Such are his credentials — a member of an immigrant family who arrived in Bolton before his first birthday and grew up to be something of a local hero, Tasos is the ideal candidate for a charming feature in the local paper. You can find him time and again in the pages of the Bolton News from across the last two decades, smiling with a fat fish supper outside his restaurant or joyfully linking arms with the mayor. He’s the perfect spokesperson for Bolton — with one catch: It turns out that Tasos isn’t so keen on the direction Bolton has been heading in.

Tasos can in many ways speak better than anyone about the changes to Bolton’s economy and identity over the last thirty to forty years. His business is one of few to have survived so long, something he chalks down to constant adaptation — in 1997 he bought the bakery next door, transforming the takeaway into a 60-cover restaurant. In 2008 he expanded outwards into the aforementioned orangery. He’s constantly developing the menu, and has completely redesigned the interior of the restaurant. “It looks more like a hotel now,” he says proudly. “It looks like you’re going on a cruise somewhere.” But while Olympus managed to stay afloat, Tasos claims that the town centre continued to decline, and when in 1996 the completion of Middlebrook Shopping Centre took footfall away from the high street, Tasos started fearing the worst for his fish and chips. “I thought, this is going to affect the business,” he tells me. “What am I going to do?” And then he realised that the answer was simple. If people were leaving Bolton to do their shopping and dining in other towns, then he’d be the one that takes them there. One lightbulb moment and 18 years later, he started Tasos Tours.

Which, I soon discover, are less tours exactly, and more of a lift to wherever you’re going. Today we’re going to the Lake District, it’s a pick-your-stop situation: Kendal, Ambleside, or Bowness. As our coach bends heavily down Bolton’s side streets, Tasos either stands at the front with the microphone, or moves with ease between the passengers, seemingly immune to the bus’s twist and thunk. In fact, contrary to what I said earlier, I realise that Tasos Tours are exactly what they say on the tin — a meandering tour of Tasos’ life itself. Here he is now on the mic, telling us a bit about himself: He’s Tasos, in case you didn’t know that already, unmarried, childless, but don’t worry, he isn’t proposing to anyone today. And there he is at the back of the bus, leaning over the passengers to point out iconic Bolton sights: The location of his grandparent’s old chip shop, and where they’d take him to see the wrestling as a child. When we finally leave Lancashire for Cumbria, he teases us with a few facts about the length and width of Windermere, but all his other facts pertain to what pub he used to drink at, and which rooms, in his early adulthood, he’d rock up to reservationless, caution to the wind. Tasos offers tours all over the north: York, Skipton, Whitby, Knaresborough on market day, but all of them invariably begin and end in one location — Olympus, so that while Tasos takes the shoppers and the day-trippers out of Bolton, he’s sure to bring them back for chippy tea.

And so back at the restaurant, Tasos and I settle down in the orangery, to have a longer, more detailed discussion about the changing face of Bolton than we were able to have on the bumping coach. Tasos tells me that, in the 60s and 70s when his family first arrived, Bolton was a “buzzing”, “vibrant” town, with an economy that thrived both day and night, and a strong sense of community and identity. “These were the true Boltonians. They were indigenous, you could call them. The natives of the town.” But today, Tasos says, the Bolton identity is all but gone.

In 2017, the town became home to 255 refugees from Somalia, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo — over a third of the total number of refugees welcomed to the UK by the Gateway Protection Scheme. In April of that year it was revealed that Bolton at the time was home to 1,129 asylum seekers, who Tasos points out could not afford to frequent the businesses on the high street, including his own. As he tells it, various shops and restaurants soon began to close down or move elsewhere as a direct result of the influx. But the loss of boutique businesses was the least of Bolton’s concerns. “Lets say you put displaced people with no money in Bolton. Displaced and refugees,” he says. “One or two of these would stand out, but let's say you bring a lot of people like that. Then what happens? Then you lose your identity”. I ask him to explain a little more what he thinks the original Boltonian identity is, and in what way it’s changed, and he answers my question with a question of his own — asking me what the chances are that he and I would move together to India, or Pakistan, and bring with us our own British cultures and identities, and inflict them on the locals there, and raise a family there together, and live there for the rest of our lives.

I consider this for a minute. The two of us do look related: slight and swarthy and vaguely mediterranean in appearance. Yes, I can just see us now, fresh off the Tasos Tour coach and straight into the smack-hot air of Islamabad: Ophira Gottlieb and Tasos Pattichis, salt of the earth Brits not born exactly but bred, bringing with us the British identity and British ideals that our British parents instilled in us just as soon as they passed their citizenship tests. I must’ve gotten carried away with the fantasy, adrift imagining our lives once we decide to head westward and open our Traditional English Fish and Chip Shop in Peshawar, with a couple of miniature Gottlieb-Pattichises clutching at our apron strings, because Tasos says “Give me an answer. No, don’t just shake your head for goodness sake. You’re a clever girl, you understand it. Give me an answer, we’re recording. Just say it.” I admit to Tasos that the chances of the two of us raising a family together in Pakistan seem fairly low. “Low,” he repeats. “Exactly right. Exactly right. It's not about being prejudiced. This is my identity. This is your identity.”

And what is that identity? Within the streets of Bolton I spot familiar faces: Rice ‘n’ Three, for example, an Indian restaurant opened by the original owners of This & That, who invented a cuisine that is now as much a part of the Northern Quarter’s identity as its multiple-hundred-year-old boozers. And similarly, Olympus Fish and Chips has come to be a defining feature of Bolton town centre — a restaurant that, following in the footsteps of its predecessor Olympus Grill, still sells moussaka alongside rag pudding, peas, and chips.

After the tour and before my train home, sitting for a while with my scone and cup of tea, I end up chatting with an elderly lady beside me who had also been on the coach. She goes on around six Tasos Tours a year, spread out in small bursts and larger gaps, and always goes alone — they’re not really her husband’s cup of tea, she tells me, but he comes to pick her up at the end. What does she think of the tours? She tells me that she loves them, how they let her explore parts of England that she’d otherwise never have been able to access on her own at this age. And what does she think of Tasos? She smiles fondly, if a little knowingly. “Oh he’s always like that,” she says.