Tom's Place 6.75/10 (though that's only because I added 1.25 points in the hope of avoiding domestic ructions)
Telephone 020-7351 1806.
Address 1 Cale Street, London SW3.
Open All week, 11am-11pm (midnight Thur-Sat )
The tone for what would prove a lunch beset by marital skirmishing was set within seconds of being seated in Tom's Place, Tom Aikens' determinedly self-righteous new fish and chip joint, when I noticed a brand of fizzy drink on the beverage list. "God no, please," said my wife, "not your Elvis Costello drivel all over again."
Low-level telepathy is one of the joys of long and arduous wedlock, or so the people at Relate assure me, and here was a classic example. All I'd said was, "Oh, look, they've got R White's lemonade" and from that she foresaw the ensuing sequence of events in crystal clarity.
First, I would remind her that Costello's dad wrote and sang the Secret Lemonade Drinker song in that much-loved old telly commercial, with the pubescent Elvis on backing vocals. Next, I would point out, perhaps needlessly, that Tom's Place is in Chelsea. And then I'd start singing (I Don't Want To Go To) Chelsea.
"One note and I'm off," she continued, evidently recalling my last rendition in a restaurant, heavily in drink, with Elvis himself sitting at a nearby table - an incident frequently invoked at times of heightened tension in the 15 years since, although very seldom by me. Recalling that she had the house keys, I fell silent and reflected on a rhyming couplet.
"They call her Natasha when she looks like Elsie," as Elvis sings it, "I don't want to go to Chelsea."
Tom's Place, it struck me as we took in a room that is half affectionate pastiche of a 50s seaside chippie and half American diner, is the exact inverse of that lyrical character. With the bottles of Sarson's on the table, tartare sauce served in tiny cardboard tubs and a cameo among the side orders for the "chip buttie", it makes a bold stab at playing Elsie. But the clientele and, especially, the prices, not to mention the sacrilegious dearth of pickled onions and cucumbers, suggest that even if she has swapped the string of pearls for something garish from Accessorize, it's Natasha tarting it up for a jape.
Not that Aikens isn't deadly serious himself. We know this because, while he tends in person to his Michelin-starred place down the road, he appears here on a loop on a flatscreen TV sandwiched between faux portholes, looking very grave as he chats with Quentin Knights, "Skipper, The Sea Spirit", and assorted sustainability experts about the need to protect stocks of threatened fish such as the haddock by cooking only with unthreatened species such as the pollack and the hideously ugly, big-headed gurnard.
Hats off to Aikens for embracing an important cause, for sure. But whether you really wish to watch him banging on about it while you eat, even with the sound thankfully muted, is another matter entirely. So is the question of whether you want to pay £12 for a fairly meagre portion of Marine Stewardship Council-certified cod. I know Elsie wouldn't. Judging by the clientele packing this jolly upstairs room (downstairs is the takeaway bar), Natasha certainly would.
So would my wife, who loved everything about the place, from the jolly decor to the splendour of the orange marmalade ice-cream and apple-y deliciousness of an English white called Bacchus Reserve. She raved about her pollack and fat chips, deep-fried in beef dripping as the Creator intended (Leviticus), justly lauding crunchiness of batter and freshness of flesh within. She sanctified her mushy peas, too.
Whether she would have been quite so enamoured had she been the one sat facing the aforementioned TV screen I cannot say, but although I liked my cod and especially my side order of onion rings (the frying here is superb), the aggregate of minor irritants was way too much. One was being told, by an incredibly endearing young chap from Turkmenistan whom we ended up wanting to adopt, that they had run out of skate. Another was the styling of that lustrous fish as "ray", Natasha presumably spending more time in the Dordogne than in Harry Ramsden's.
"Don't be so bloody silly," said my wife when I harrumphed. "Would you say Steve Irwin was killed by a stingskate? Have you heard of the surrealist photographer Man Skate?" It was, as I say, that kind of lunch.
Other Natashoid touches include the absence of brown sauce (why?) and substitution of Heinz ketchup with an effete, homemade tomato sauce (why?), irksomely right-on resinous trays rather than big, white plates, and the elegant mothers at the next table engaging in the traditional chippie debate that pits Eton against Winchester.
"This place is great, and you're just a crashing, inverted snob," my wife said, concluding our own brief debate about whether it is ever seemly to trendify, preachify and in any way poncify such an earthily sublime experience. The one thing we did agree about, though, is that, if you must, this is as technically accomplished a way of doing so as there probably is.
But when it comes to fish and chips, really, who on earth wants to go to Chelsea?
The bill
Pollack and chips £11.50
Cod and chips £12
Onion rings £2.50
Mushy peas £2.50
Green leaves £2.50
Two glasses Bacchus Reserve £11
Subtotal £42
Tip £6
Total £48
