Service all at sea

Just how healthy is fish and chips? About as nutritious as a deep-fried Mars Bar, I would imagine. You'd be better off making your way up to your attic, digging out some old copies of Whizzer and Chips and washing them down with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.

Wrong, according to Ian Marber of the Food Doctor Clinic. He claims fish and chips is the third healthiest form of fast food there is. Incredibly, it's all thanks to the batter. It may be little more than fried dough and fat, but it succeeds in sealing in all the goodness of the fish.

After reading this in last week's papers, I thought a trip to the Sea Shell was in order. This legendary establishment on Lisson Grove is, by some margin, the most famous fish and chip shop in the world. Indeed, to call it a 'shop' scarcely does it justice since, in addition to the takeaway service, there's a fully-fledged restaurant next door. It's more like a laboratory designed to perfect the culinary excellence of Britain's national dish.

The service, as you'd expect from a British institution, was awful. I booked a table for 8.15pm and when I arrived there was a small queue of people waiting to be seated. After the queue had been completely ignored for 10 minutes, I stopped one of the passing waitresses and asked her if the Sea Shell had such a thing as a maitre d'. She gave me a blank look and then moved on.

Eventually, the manageress finally found time to seat the people at the front of the queue. It soon became apparent that no one had bothered to book apart from us, so I button-holed the manageress and pointed this out.

She couldn't have been more surprised if I'd announced I was a visiting inspector for the Michelin Guide.

'Booked?!? Who with? When?' By the time we were seated, at around 8.45pm, I was beginning to regret my decision to opt for such a 'healthy' meal.

The first course was a disaster. I ordered fish balls which, far from being straight out of the deep-fat fryer, tasted as if they'd been fried, then frozen, then re-heated in a microwave. An inadequate microwave, I should add, since they were served at room temperature. I could only manage one before pushing them aside.

My wife is a vegetarian so, admittedly, a fish and chip restaurant isn't the ideal place to take her. Nevertheless, they could have made a little more effort with her baked potato. It, too, seemed to have been warmed up in the same faulty microwave. It was so lukewarm that the cheese she sprinkled on it didn't even attempt to melt. She couldn't try the same test with a slab of butter since the restaurant didn't provide any. I've seen more appetising potatoes in Spud-U-Like.

Fortunately, the fish and chips, when they arrived, were actually quite good. I opted for the haddock and it really did taste as if all the vitamin D had been locked in by the batter. My wife made do with snacking on my chips - she'd only managed two mouthfuls of her baked potato - and pronounced them well above average. All in all, the evening didn't turn out to be quite such a disaster after all.