Rating: 6/10

Telephone 020-8742 0766.
Address 6-8 Elliott Road, London W4.
Open Tues-Sun, noon-2.30pm (3.30pm, Sat & Sun); 6-10.30pm (10pm, Sun).
Price Around £40 a head for three courses with wine. Set lunch/early dinner, £16.50/£18.50.
Wheelchair access & disabled WC.

With the World Cup almost upon us, the pressure intensifies on journalists of all types to find ever more contrived footballing references in the misguided hope of captivating those who probably prefer their sport confined to the sports pages. What on earth, for example, does a small fish restaurant in a west London suburb have to do with football? Nothing. At this point in the quadrennial cycle, however, it is obligatory to flail around for an analogy; having flailed for perhaps too long, I can declare that Fish Hook is the Tottenham Hotspur of the piscine eating world.

It is a painful and onerous burden to follow the second best club in a neighbourhood. Life in the shadow of a superior, close rival is a sunless existence, and the misery persists even in comparatively good times. When Everton finished fourth in the Premiership last year, Liverpool spitefully derided the achievement by winning the Champions League. God willing, a Spanish team has the wit to prevent a recurrence, but at time of writing Arsenal stand poised to torment Spurs in an identical manner. However hard the nebbish second club tries, however much it improves, however realistic the mirage of imminent equality may appear, the monolith around the corner is always there to ridicule its pretensions and leave it defined more by what it isn't than by what it is.

For Fish Hook, the problem is FishWorks, a small but celebrated national chain that relies on the barely penetrable formula of buying the finest fish, cooking it as accurately as possible and plonking it on plates. While the Chiswick branch of FishWorks stands on a prime site in a busy shopping street, Fish Hook is tucked away in a residential side street. Within 0.37 seconds of walking through the door, you are struck by the sense of moroseness so familiar for so long at White Hart Lane.

This place knows very well that it is second best, the tone of underdog gloom instantly apparent from a cheap and cheerless decor - walls painted a depressing, lemony shade of off-white and bedecked by colourless, unframed canvases of lobster tails and jellyfish tentacles; stone-effect flooring; poor lighting; tiny, badly chipped tables crammed too close together - which might have been put together in three hours and could be transformed in another three hours into a Thai or Tex-Mex joint. "It would be fine if it was a beach cafe where people could wander in with sandy feet," said my wife, "but in town it feels cold and clinical."

The irritating thing is that, buried somewhere beneath the shabby anonymity, you sense a really good little restaurant fighting for air. The menu shows signs of the imagination markedly lacking elsewhere by offering almost everything as either starter or main course, and the dishes themselves are thoughtful and inventive, if sometimes a shade too busy for my taste. One dish even managed to dispel the sepulchral atmosphere for a while: a plate of six enormous Saudi prawns, grilled and submerged in a sauce of butter, garlic and chillies, was so spectacularly good that, having mopped up every droplet with some outstanding bread, we felt compelled to order it again.

Ceviche of tuna, swordfish, salmon and scallops came with salmon caviar and a few too many granules of rock salt, while the other starter of smoked salmon with pea shoots and horseradish cream was pretty pointless. All three main courses, however, were beautifully presented and full of fun. Roast cod with chorizo and some glorious broad beans had "a lovely, subtle, fresh taste"; grilled fillet of sea bream had "a great flavour" and worked very nicely with the raw asparagus and baby artichokes that came with it; my monkfish wrapped in an almost invisibly thin layer of Bayonne ham and served with shiitake mushrooms was excellent, too.

There is no doubting the chef's talent, then, but restaurants are about much more than their food, and this one lets down its kitchen in every other respect. Somehow, Fish Hook urgently needs to tart itself up and find the energy to shake off the aura of perpetual, self-pitying defeatism that clings to White Hart Lane through every new false dawn.