It takes a certain woman to be married to a chef. You have to get used to the late hours, the early rising, the hair that comes home at night smelling like a chip pan. If you are Mrs Tom Aikens, as Amber (née Nuttall), the adorable aristocratic PR bunny he married 18 months ago is, you also have to get used to a certain amount of competition on the ladies front.

Take, for example, the dinner the three of us happened to be invited to a few months ago, where Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, the little minx, wriggled and giggled whenever he said anything and almost had to be prised off him when it was time to go. “Yes, that was funny,” Tom recalls in his calm Norfolk monotone. “And yes, I suppose Amber does get a lot of that, but she’s used to it.”

It’s 11am and we are sitting in the reception of Tom Aikens, the Michelin-starred Chelsea restaurant he opened in 2003. Things have changed a little since we saw each other at that dinner. The popular up-market fish-and-chip shop he opened last summer has been closed down after complaints from the neighbours about the smell. And he’s not doing his food products at Selfridges any more. Otherwise, he is just as hyper and driven as ever: team Aikens is raring to go. There’s the cookbook. Then there’s the hugely desirable cookware he has just designed with the couple’s friend David Linley. There’s also the possibility of a television series in which he goes to places such as Sierra Leone to address one of his pet topics: fish piracy. “It isn’t going to be daisies-in-the-field stuff,” he says. “It’s going to be a proper look at overfishing the seas.” As for a reality-TV show, à la Marco or Gordon? “God, no, that whole Hell’s Kitchen thing doesn’t appeal to me at all. I think all that reality-TV stuff is dross.”

So, does he have what it takes to be a star? Is he capable of the world domination that, say, Jamie Oliver has achieved, without a TV career? He’s photogenic, for sure — Gap should use him in its next campaign, if it hasn’t already — but telegenic? I’ve heard him bang on about sustainable fishing and, bless him, as he might put it himself, he can go on.

Whatever happens, his secret weapon is his wife, who unwaveringly supports everything he does. The couple first met two years ago through a friend. In one respect, they couldn’t have been less suited: Amber, the ultra-privileged public-school gel, whose mother assumed she’d “marry an old Etonian with a grouse moor and a yacht”, and Tom, a scrappy, volatile kid from near Norwich, who, with his twin brother, used to drive his poor mum and wine-merchant dad mad with his antics. They did, however, know people in common (Lady Carole Bamford, for example, who hired Tom to cook at Daylesford, and Lady Anouschka Hempel, who showed him how anything — when you knew the right people and had the right backing — could happen). They were both redheads. And they were both deeply, deeply into food. “Amber had just come back from Cannes,” Tom recalls. “She was all bronzed and beautiful. We went to Borough market and came back with the ingredients, and I watched her going chak-chak-chak with the veg, and realised she knew exactly what she was doing. It turns out she’d spent a year training as a chef under Michel Bourdin at the Connaught. That was when I knew.”

The wedding, as you might imagine, was featured in Hello! and studded with names, including Tom and Laura Parker Bowles and Net-a-Porter’s Natalie Massenet. The couple looked great, the food was sublime. Every single detail of the banquet was minutely, fastidiously, obsessively overseen by Tom.

But then, as anyone who knows him even vaguely will tell you, he is an absolute, raging perfectionist. Nothing is done by halves. And let’s not forget the famous strops. A case in point being the worker he was meant to have branded with a knife. “Look, one has to be on Tom’s wavelength,” says Amber, who we meet later. “Not everyone gets him. Me, I love his drive and ambition. That passion, though, needs to be reined in, and I think that’s why we click. He needs me to be slightly bullying, to identify holes.”

And what of his cooking? What say the experts of that? Where does he rate among the pantheon of great British cooks? Well, as AA Gill puts it: “I wasn’t a fan of his haute cooking. He makes a type of top-grade food where he cooks for guidebooks and photographers. It’s all fuss and show. But he’s done what a lot of the top chefs haven’t been able to do, which is make really good-quality midrange food. I love Tom’s Kitchen. It’s a nice, buzzy, local restaurant with decent, honest food. And that’s a skill that most of them trying to do diffusion-line cooking don’t have.”

The bar upstairs at Tom’s Kitchen, near the eponymous restaurant, has just been launched as a breakfast salon, where you can listen to power players talk about business, while munching on perfect scrambled eggs. I am sitting there listening to Amber explaining how, on the rare occasion Tom has time off, there is never, ever any question that she would, for example, do the cooking for a dinner party — but this does not worry her one bit. “I don’t think competing works,” she explains briskly. “Tom is the star in our marriage. I’ve cut down a lot on my other work — it interferes with my life with Tom. And Tom is my priority. I want to be there for him when I can. Old-fashioned, but it works for us.”

“Yeah, well, Amber knows the life,” Tom says, when I ask him about this. “I suppose that’s why she’s patient with me. And I couldn’t have her working the same hours as me. I can be a little controlling, I suppose, but I know Amber doesn’t mind. That’s why I love the gal.”

Both my father and grandfather were very keen sailors. My father had a 19ft open sailing boat — a Drascombe lugger — called Sea Lavender that he had bought second-hand. At weekends and during school holidays we often used to go to Blakeney, on the north Norfolk coast, and to Suffolk to go mackerel fishing from the back of the boat. These were great times. For my brothers and me, it was our first taste of real freedom, the first time we experienced being alone with nature. I have always had a great fondness for the sea and that is how I developed my passion for fish — I have become fascinated by how it gets from the sea to the plate. Fish is very tasty and exceptionally good for you. It’s simple to cook and to prepare, and trying out species other than the ones you are used to brings many rewards, which I hope these recipes will show.

Tom's top 10 fish to try

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