Tom finery from Aikens

In a book called Off the Menu, published in 1998, which is a compilation of interviews with top London chefs and Terence Conran, Tom Aikens, then chef and co-proprietor at Pied à Terre in Charlotte Street, is asked whether Michelin stars are important to him. "Well for me it's the only reason I do it. I mean I've been working in Michelin restaurants before I started at this place, all my life. It's the only thing that I've wanted in my life. And you know to me it's the ultimate. It is the ultimate. It is."

Now we all know that wishing too hard for something can turn out badly. Not long after the above admission, Aikens, who had maintained in his own right the two Michelin stars awarded to Richard Neat when he was chef at Pied à Terre, had to leave the restaurant after it was claimed that he had burned a member of his brigade with a hot palette knife. Long hours, the heat of the kitchen and the stress that is in your stars can lead to chefs losing their rag. It is not exactly an unheard-of phenomenon.

Aikens stopped cooking for a while, went to join one of his former mentors, Pierre Koffmann, and then worked in private service for Andrew Lloyd Webber and for the Bamford family, who own and run the Staffordshire produce supplier Wootton Organic. Meanwhile, he was planning his return to a particular restaurant, his own. Aikens and his wife, Laura, sold their flat in order to become the major investors in TOM AIKENS, which opened last week in Chelsea.

In these straitened times, does London need one more ambitious, ego-driven, fancy-pants restaurant? In my view, when it is the restaurant Tom Aikens, it does. It is, to put no finer word on it, a delight. And something of a moral tale. Enforced absence at a relatively mature age from the hot-house, hellish world of restaurant kitchens - which resulted in Aikens touring France in order to eat, having to cook to please an individual paymaster, and discovering at Wootton Organic the reward in noble, indigenous ingredients - has brought to his new venture an ease and lightness of touch which are often missing ingredients at shrines to gastronomy.

Aikens met the designer Anouska Hempel in his capacity as private cook. Her input into the conversion of what was formerly The Marlborough Arms pub has created an unusually pleasing environment. Unshowy luxury, where investment is in the things you touch - linen, plates, cutlery and glassware - and in natural, owncolour materials and flattering lighting, leads to a relaxed atmosphere. Contributing to this are front-of-house staff, led by Laura Aikens, who neither recite back to you what you have ordered (a maddening habit) nor quiz you constantly, or indeed at all, about whether everything is all right.

Sommelier Gearoid Devaney, who has worked for Pierre Gagnaire in Paris, is a friendly, encouraging soul who approved of our choice of the fashionable Austrian Gruner Veltliner and steered us towards a profound Faugeres from the good-value Languedoc.

An almost touching desire to please, impress and confirm his talent means that Aikens sends out waves of little extras around the basic three courses, some predicated on jelly, a medium in which he loves to imprison flavours. A beetroot and a carrot jelly layered with purées of the vegetables accompanied pieces of skate filled and wrapped with ribbons of carrot plus cubes of luscious bellypork on little skewers of rosemary.

After those arrived tiny, fried, red mullet on slabs of intensely flavoured, reduced tomatoes also held in jelly. The three first courses we chose revolved around smoked eel, rabbit rillettes and frog's legs. The recipient of the last, served as dainty balls of meat pushed up their shin bones among asparagus, peas, peeled infant broad beans, poached lettuce and delicate leaves of chervil-flavoured pasta, said he would like in future to have this dish at every meal.

Smoked eel with quail's eggs served in an eelandapple soup with eel beignets was as impressive as the rabbit rillettes contained within a stockade of thinly cut, tufted baby carrots and accompanied by a tangle of carrot-and-tarragon salad which had precisely the right amount of that loud-mouthed herb. A carrot-and-Muscat jelly set a seal on the meat.

Our main courses included a deconstruction of pork using extremities such as trotter and cheek which was instituted in Aikens's Pied à Terre days but was, said its recipient, now more subtly spiced. There was a veal dish where care about its provenance was emphatically apparent in texture and flavour, and poached chicken served with the confit leg, artichoke velouté and a stupendously good wodge of truffled macaroni, a brilliant conceit.