LONDON — The image of fish and chips as working-class food is taking a battering with the arrival of a high-end restaurant in London where the fish all come from sustainable stocks and a single takeaway costs £15, or $30.
Tom's Place opened earlier this month in the West London neighbourhood of Chelsea, where owner Tom Aikens already runs his eponymous, Michelin-starred restaurant. Call it a posh chippie or a green chippie, but Tom's Place may well point to the future for fish-and-chip shops already suffering from rising costs and depleted stocks of cod, Britain's favourite frying fish.
There is cod on the menu at Tom's Place, but it's line-caught in the Pacific. Mr. Aikens wants to steer his customers to the wallflowers of the sea: red and grey gurnard; megrim sole; pollock and ray.
Nearly all the fish come from a group of fishermen in Cornwall, who are featured in a video playing in the restaurant. Staff have been given an inch-thick binder of facts in case any customers want to know the provenance of their lunch.
A plate of fish and chips at Tom's place in West London, where a single order costs £15, or $30. (Randy Quan for The Globe and Mail)
"Consumers are all becoming more aware of food and the role it plays in our lives," said Mr. Aikens, who has spent much of the past year, including part of his honeymoon, with the fisherman of Newlyn, Cornwall. "They want to know more, and they're asking the right questions."
Posh chippies such as the Fish Club and Sea Cow, which, like Tom's Place, sell fish from stocks sanctioned by the non-profit Marine Stewardship Council, have sprung up in London's pricier neighbourhoods. At Tom's Place, customers can choose to have their French fries cooked in beef dripping or rapeseed oil - but will they balk at paying £12 ($24) for a piece of fish, and £2.50 ($5) for a bowl of peas?
"I think people are slowly realizing that to have great produce that's sustainable and traceable, they will have to pay a slight premium for quality," he said. "The underlying factor in all this is that they will know exactly where all the fish is from."
Mr. Aikens is in the vanguard of British chefs who were once best known for their celebrity-filled restaurants but are now pushing the public to question food sources. Recently on television, Gordon Ramsay sang the praises of diver-caught scallops and Jamie Oliver condemned the condition of factory-raised chickens.
"Sustainable fishing is a hot-button topic in the U.K.," said Julia Roberson of the conservation group Seafood Choices Alliance. "But in terms of what's available to consumers, information about meat and vegetable production is light years ahead of fish."
About 260 million orders of fish and chips are sold annually in Britain, according to the seafood industry group Seafish, making it Britain's top takeaway meal. Cod is the most popular choice, followed by haddock, and a full meal in London costs about £5 ($10).
Chefs such as Mr. Aikens and conservation groups are fighting a deep-seated prejudice that sees the British leery of finding a strange new fish on their plates. "Our long-term tradition is that we're a fairly conservative fish-eating society," said Sam Fanshawe of Britain's Marine Conservation Society. "The government has done very little to diversify our tastes, and there's not enough government support for new fishing initiatives." The MCS recently launched Fishonline.org, an online directory of endangered fish for retailers, restaurateurs and consumers.
The idea of fish and chips - eaten straight from a piece of paper, sprinkled with malt vinegar - is so central to British culture that it was voted the country's favourite food (and smell) in 2006. The Duchess of Cornwall, Camilla Parker Bowles, has been spied in a chippie, and it was the meal served at the glitzy wedding of Liverpool soccer star Steven Gerrard last summer. But will consumers' green guilt over the state of the oceans make the chippie an endangered species? In 1927 there were 35,000 fish-and-chip restaurants in Britain, but fewer than one-third that number exist today.
"Unless we do something about the situation and start looking at diversity of choices, fish and chips as we know it is going to disappear," Ms. Roberson said. Chippie owners are in a double bind, she said, since they face rising prices but also difficulty securing a steady supply of fish if they choose to move to less endangered stocks.
"Over the past few years, the price of fish has just shot up," said Gordon Hillan, owner of the Townhead Café in Biggar, Scotland, which last month was named fish-and-chip shop of the year. For the first time, the competition took into account the contestants' commitment to sustainable fishing. Mr. Hillan said that, like Mr. Aikens, he's trying to coax his customers into taking a chance on less familiar fish, from hake to pollock.
"We don't subscribe to the demise of fish and chips,"
Mr. Hillan said. "There will
always be fish and chips in
this country."
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