Meet Haddon Salt – the would-have-been Colonel Sanders of fish and chips

In the late 1960s and early ’70s, the serendipitously named Haddon Salt was well on his way to becoming the Colonel Sanders of fish and chips. Instead, as this short documentary recalls, his once-thriving restaurant chain H Salt Esq became the fast-food empire that never quite was. With jaunty direction from the Canadian filmmaker Ben Proudfoot, The King of Fish and Chips features the charismatic Salt explaining how the American Dream came calling after the Second World War, whereupon Salt moved from Skegness in England to Sausalito, California. There, he sold the deep-fried delicacy alongside the ‘romance of England’ to enthusiastic American patrons. However, his company’s growth was curtailed after he decided to let Kentucky Fried Chicken buy his ascendent business and the product suffered. Charmingly told, Proudfoot’s exploration of what could have been is also a light parable on the importance of ‘doing things right’, the pitfalls of cutting corners, the perils of relinquishing your name, and the necessity of moving on.