Telephone: 020-7727 7528
Open: Lunch, Tues-Sun, noon-2.30; dinner, all week, 6-10.30pm
Price: £30-40 a head for three courses with wine and coffee
Stars: 3/10

The eruption had been coming from the moment we arrived at Geales, a venerable Notting Hill fish and chippie recently revamped and reopened under new ownership, and when it came, it did so with the livid outrage of Charlton Heston at the end of Planet Of The Apes. "You maniacs, you blew it," hissed one of our friends with such anguish that a piece of haddock flew from his mouth. "Ah, damn you. Damn you all to hell."

The catalyst for this outburst wasn't the discovery of the Statue of Liberty poking up through the sands of the Forbidden Zone, but a pea. "That's the final straw, that is," my friend went on. "The mushy peas are like bullets. This isn't a refurbishment or a reinvention. This is a desecration."

If this tended towards the melodramatic, that's probably because, for the past 15 of its 68 years, this has been the venue for a regular old colleagues' lunch at which we'd linger until late afternoon, drinking wine on expenses and moaning about how gruelling journalism has become. And if what follows seems unusually venomous, that's probably because Geales, the first place I ever reviewed, was one of my Desert Island Restaurants.

Alas, alas and thrice alas, no more. For what was a sweet, dowdy place serving great comfort food has become a nasty, cynical clip joint. The portions have been slashed and the prices sharply hiked, the walls painted a sterile, Farrow & Ball shade of crowd-control grey, and the nice Mrs Overalls replaced by a French staff presumably seconded from Embassy, the new owners' Mayfair joint, and seemingly not overtly relishing the transfer. "What is a wally?" inquired the gloomy manager, when we requested pickled cucumber by its proper name, while a young waitress merrily rescued herself from taking our order on the grounds that she cannot speak a word of English.

If the service was morose and chaotic, the food was absurd and cynical. What the menu calls "prawn cocktail" was no such thing, the prawns coming in garlic mayonnaise rather than Marie Rose sauce and sitting on top of a layer of avocado, the ensemble served in a facetiously angled bowl (poncy crockery is quite a motif). Soft-shell crab hadn't been fried at a high enough temperature to seal the flavour. The highlight of the meal was a fish soup of such lustrous texture and depth and flavour that one of us felt obliged to order an extra bowl. What arrived all of two minutes later was thin, bland and nothing like the original, someone having poured hot water into half a portion to bulk it out and save himself the effort. As if we wouldn't notice.

By the time the haddocks and chips arrived, expectations were not high, although they were not quite low enough. In its previous incarnation, the beauty of Geales fish was that they stuck to the old tradition of frying it in beef dripping, which gave it a delectable savour. That's gone, and I'd estimate that of the twee little rectangle marooned in a giant white bowl, 50% was beer batter and 50% haddock. Nine quid for so chiselling amount of such dreary fish is chutzpah enough. To charge another £2 for a measly portion of lukewarm chips, weirdly served separately, is asking for a slap.

Lack of space precludes a full inventory of irritants, but bringing the tomato ketchup in lilliputian jugs particularly got on my top ones. If that chichi abhorrence and the (oxy)moronically rock-hard mushy peas didn't adequately reflect the attempt to sanitise a style of food that is supposed to be crude, sloppy and life-shortening, jam roly-poly seemingly made without suet finished the job. Mocha tart was magnificent, but you don't go to a fish and chip place for mocha tart.

"May I apologise on behalf of Her Majesty?" I found myself apologising to the friendly, stereotypically bell-shaped American family at the next table as they rose to depart. "This isn't how it's supposed to be. Next time you come, try Costas round the corner." That's where we'll be from now on for the regular whine-and-whinge lunch. The only way I'd return to Geales is at the controls of a demolition ball.