1 Cale Street, SW3; 020 7351 1806
Mon-Wed, 11am-11pm; Thu-Sat, 11am-11.30pm; Sun, 11am-10.30pm

5 stars: Pride of place; 4 stars: Going places; 3 stars: Know your place; 2 stars: Out of place; 1 star: All over the place

New York must have more places to eat than any comparable city. There are stretches of avenue where every shop front has a neon pictogram indicating simple Day-Glo sustenance: a green coffee cup of the sort you never get offered now because it doesn’t hold enough, a ghoulish Chinese duck winking, saying “Duck” for the benefit of us round eyes who don’t read pictogram. There are bowls with chopsticks and sombreros and pigs in chef’s hats with aprons advertising the eternal truth that you really can’t save your own bacon. Burgers and pizzas shine like beacons for the peckish. Lurid cheesecake and radiant beer tempt the sidewalk Odysseus, promising to turn us all into happy swine.

Though the dining rooms promise the fabled comestibles of the exotic corners, each emits a waft of thick smell that invisibly dovetails with its neighbours’ into half a dozen notes, like an insistent nasal jingle of sweat, fat, onions, cinnamon and stewed tomatoes. The parade of dining rooms is occasionally punctuated by convenience stores that sell new short-suck cigarettes, specially packaged for that brief intercourse drag under the chilly awning, and boiled-Barbie-pink Pepto-Bismol. Most of the kitchens are of the semi-skilled, short-order sort, selling soggy approximations of things that were delicious once, when made long ago by someone’s grandmother – the immigrant food of touching nostalgia, coarsened and stupefied by forgetful hands into a monoglot pap. Looking down the half mile of little, breezily bright, illuminated eateries in the appropriately named Hell’s Kitchen, I thought that they defied taste, hunger or nutrition, owing their existence only to the cheesy, sugared, unctuous, grazing greed of the huddled masses, yearning to be three sizes bigger than XXL. These uncountable diners are proofed against recession, as they were also immune to boom.

I had dinner at the Spotted Pig, which is consistently brilliant, with Mario Batali, a chef, restaurateur and gustatory guru who talked with a messianic, sexual glee about ingredients and what he’d like to do to them while wearing shorts and Crocs. I ate pigs’ ears; he hammered tequila shots and told me the recession would hit next year when the financial bonuses wouldn’t cover the payments on the holiday house, the boat and the mistress. It would take out the amateur restaurants, the ones run by the rich kids who thought it would be fun and the creative socialites who thought they could do it better. There would be a grand cull, which must be welcomed.

Let’s raise a glass of something ridiculously overpriced to the demise of style snobbery and concept, to vacant, chic and crowded envy. Depressions are like severe frosts: they do for the parasites and the fungus. Simple ingredients, well prepared, at a price point: that’s what you want, said Mario.

I also ate at the teeming and gossipy Waverly Inn, the only place in New York where I saw paparazzi. At the next table, P.Diddy was mime-dining with whatever her name is who plays Meredith from Grey’s Anatomy; just the two of them, à deux, with a skeleton entourage. The bodyguards and yes-friends talked quietly among themselves while P and Meredith caught up on their e-mails. Socialising with a BlackBerry goes beyond rudeness: it’s a sort of self-induced autism, but without the sympathy. A pathetic, vacuous solipsism. The consoling joke is that in dark restaurants, the blue-white light of the screen shining from below is possibly the most unattractive look for a celebrity with narcissism issues. It makes everyone look like a zombie from a slasher movie, or, in Meredith’s case, Anthony Perkins’s mother.

Recession food in Britain is traditionally fish and chips: the staple of industrial muscle. The dish itself is more like an industrial process than cooking – oil and batter, repetitive and dangerous. Making fish and chips isn’t done by anyone as namby-pamby as a chef: the bloke is a fryer – a semi-skilled, blue-collar job – and what he offers you is as close to a balanced meal as you can get with two ingredients. Take a BlackBerry into a chippy up north and they’ll deep-fry it and impale it on a saveloy as a witch’s familiar.

Tom Aikens has just opened Tom’s Place, a chip shop on Chelsea Green, his second outing into catering for “the wretched refuse of the teeming shore”, just along the road from the jolly and popular Tom’s Kitchen. (“She was only the fishmonger’s daughter, but she put her plaice on the slab and said fillet.”) This place used to be Monkey’s, a sloaney, date-grope last resort. Now it’s reborn, in an apocalyptically apologetic and assertively undesigned designery sense. It’s a bit like eating in a human recycling bin: I imagined maybe we’d all get tipped out and turned into Amazonian basket-weavers or Inuit plumbers.

There is an intrinsic problem with environmental fish: this isn’t their environment and there aren’t enough of them. And the ones that we can eat are caught hideously and are full of heavy metal – not in a Def Leppard seal way. There is a lot of explaining about sustainable, renewable, recycled, organic and general guilt-inducing stuff on the menu, so it feels a bit like a Catholic confessional.

The menu is commendably short and au point. This isn’t fancy fish’n’chips or poissons frits mit une twist, or a concept. These are fish with good intentions. Unfortunately, good intentions batter no haddock, and if you come from north of the border, then fish and chips means haddock. But it’s rare. The southern alternative is cod, which is also rare. This year’s smart, fashionable alternatives are pollock and gurnard. And for all its marvellous references and right-on encomia, pollock is actually a poor fish with a weedy texture, like blown Kleenex, with an insipid, wan flavour – skimmed fish, fish-lite. And the reason it’s so plentiful is that you wouldn’t eat it if you had a choice. Trying to get us to eat sea dross by pretending it’s a fabulously new delicacy that just needs a bit of careful cooking does a disservice to green eating, because it’s plainly a lie between the teeth.

And anyway, it simply moves the problem on to another species: what are we going to eat when the pollock is off? Pollock’s particularly not good deep-fried; in batter, it gives up what little attraction it had. And the sustainably caught cod was too small a fillet, so it was overcooked by the time the batter was done. It needs to be like Percy Montgomery – big and flaky. The new star was the gurnard: brilliant deep-fried, the Amy Winehouse of battered fish. It doesn’t look promising, with its big head, but it is surprisingly meaty – a sonorous, bluesy mouthful. Tartare sauce came in horrible little medical paper cups. And there’s homemade tomato sauce, which is to Heinz’s ketchup what your mother’s homemade toothpaste would be to Colgate.

There was good ice cream for pudding, and the Blonde had a chocolate milkshake that she liked so much, she went back the next day and had it for breakfast. The prices are average for Chelsea, and expensive for fish and chips. All the workshop parts are right: the batter is good, the chips are the right size and consistency, the vinegar is malt, the fat is beef. What lets it down is the star – the little mermaid, the fish. There is a fundamental quandary here. Some people, confronted with a rare thing, start a charity, and say we must conserve it and protect it and mate it by hand so it will grow fecund and plentisome. Then, we can chase it and kill it and eat it. Alternatively, you think, cut out the middleman. If there are only a few of them, I’ll take two. Battering and deep-frying were designed for cod and haddock. It’s passable with plaice and dogfish, and with all your best will and good intentions, if it ain’t your cods, it’s pollocks.

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