Fishing for a fashionable new franchise

Jamie gave us school dinners, Hugh has free-range chicken and now Tom Aikens makes a bid for celeb chefdom with his very own crusade: fish.

Tom's Plaice is a posh chippie in Chelsea. Walk in (there are no reservations) and it has all the usual trimmings - deep-fat fryers, takeaway counter and ketchup-red plastic seating.

But the fish here is mostly line-caught from local, sustainable sources and the menu offers green tea rather than Tizer.

Such virtue and quality obviously comes at a price. My tiddler-sized red gurnard and chips fried in beef dripping cost £12.50, clearly a drop in the ocean for Chelsea locals such as the lady in furs who picked at one fat chip while clutching onto a Chanel handbag as if it were a lifebelt. Ah - those fat chips! Triple-fried to be crunchy on the outside yet fluffy on the inside, these beauties were the business. As was the tartar sauce with crunchy capers.

But, worthy as it is to have homemade sauce, the watery orange stuff in quaint old lemonade-style bottles just wasn't ketchup.

Okay, my friend lapped it up, but what did she know? Shunning the batter she'd selected a skillet of Cornish butterfly mackerel with beetroot and herb salad (£13.50), grilled yet wonderfully moist. Continuing Tom's worthy eco-crusade, the wine list is refreshingly English - fatal given our £18 bottle of white Oxfordshire Crispin Brightwell was as easy to knock back as elderflower cordial.

No wonder we both had seconds of the jolly little £2.75 pots of homemade ice cream: our fave being a dreamy orange marmalade.

Throughout the meal, distractingly cheesy TV footage of fisherman's friend Aikens, overstyled a la David Beckham, was looped on silent repeat. So can this square-jawed hero single-handedly transform our national dish?

It certainly smells like this lad's angling for a franchise. Here's hoping it catches on.