I’ll take my hat off to Tom Aikens in just a minute, for his new restaurant moves me almost to tears with the rightness of what it is trying to do and the brilliance with which it achieves it. But first you must allow me to take the piss a little, because mounted on the wall of the upstairs eating area at Tom’s Place is a flat-screen television, and on it is a 45-minute programme about Tom Aikens, playing in an endless loop. Forever.

Now, I understand how attractive the idea of being famous must be to Mr Aikens. He’s got the special spiky haircut and everything. He does the pouty scowling thing in photos. He has a beautiful society girl for his second wife, and he acts all mean and angry sometimes. And I know that a lot of chefs go on television not just to satisfy their vanity, but in the perfectly reasonable belief that it will help to fill their restaurants. The thing is, you can’t show a film of yourself on a permanent loop on the wall of your own gaff. You just can’t.

The staff had already been driven half mad by it and turned the sound off. I worked in shops and bars for many years (well, two) and know what it can do to your head, listening to the same album on a loop for months at a time (especially a Christmas album), but making employees watch the endless repetition of a television film featuring their boss is quite simply inhumane.

We know Tom Aikens is famous. That’s why this place is called Tom’s Place, and his others Tom’s Kitchen and Tom Aikens. It’s why you see him in those Volkswagen adverts looking all grand and sullen with his special spiky hair. But he shouldn’t ram it down our throats like this. I know that the programme is about Cornish fishermen, and it’s all very relevant to what he’s doing here, but most of the time it’s just Tom, with the redness of his special spiky hair nicely set off by a dark blue T-shirt, nodding and listening and occasionally talking. It’s just weird. It’s as if he suspects people have come to his gaff just to get a load of him, and because he can’t be everywhere at once, he’s softening the blow by letting them watch him on the box. I mean, I’ve done a bit of telly, but if I’m stuck in the kitchen cooking dinner for my friends I don’t put on a vid of some crappy old food programme I once made to keep them amused until I arrive with the stew.

But enough of that. This place does everything else so right that it just doesn’t matter. I could start with that name: Tom’s Place, a beautiful pun on a pun. You see, because of the tradition by which English fish and chip shops always have a punning name you can’t help but read it to yourself as Tom’s Plaice. And then you notice that it isn’t called that. As a fish restaurant, it would not be called Tom’s Place unless the possibility of it being called Tom’s Plaice were already pre-inscribed somewhere in your unconscious. The “i”, though unwritten, is clearly there. That’s genius.

The genius continues in more or less the same vein. For this is a perfect Chelsea pastiche of the English seaside chippy, from the plain black exterior and little neon sign to the mock-granite plastic tables, shiny red plastic chairs and Sarson’s bottles, neon menu boards, bare aluminium stairs, cheeky portholes with video images of rolling sea behind them and the smell of refried fat.

And then after Chelsifying the idiom, Aikens ecologicalises it. I noticed low-energy eco-bulbs in the lights hanging over the tables. The brown paper napkins were clearly recycled and the takeaway boxes and cutlery were made from corn starch.

Downstairs was the takeaway, with a couple of high tables, and upstairs was a seating area for twenty-odd. You can’t book, and at first I was inclined not to schlep all the way across town on the half-chance of a fish supper, but this place has the quick turnaround of a real fish shop (hell, it is a real fish shop, the realest there has ever been) and you won’t wait long.

The waitress who came to offer us a drink asked: “Can I get you some water? Tap or mineral?” Oh frabjous day when tap is offered first. And anyway the mineral was sainted Belu.

As my sister goggled at the exotic lady denizens of Chelsea – “Good Lord, look at that trout pout. It puts me right in the mood for a nice plate of fish” – I surveyed a menu that offered fish of the most sustainable kind: pollock, grey and red gurnard, squid, megrim sole and MSC-certified cod, all of which come in on dayboats out of Newlyn, Plymouth, Hastings, Lowestoft and Peterhead (the boats go out and come back each day, rather than loitering at sea for weeks, trawling, throwing away tons of dead by-catch to meet quotas and freezing on board). All of the fish is battered and deep-fried in beef dripping or rape seed oil, and served with chips for just over a tenner.

Five “bowl food” options included bouillabaisse and spaghetti vongole, and then there was a “pan-fried” section that contained four items, of which three, oddly, were described as “grilled”. The only actual pan-fried fellow was the (crucially) line-caught sea bass.

A starter of fresh sardines on toast was only OK, but it’s nice that the toast was a sourdough rye (so gentle with its glycaemic load, my dear). Another of moules mariniere was good, too – lovely and fresh.

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