Now my passion is fish (and chips)

Happy couple: Aikens with Amber Nuttall, whom he married earlier this year

Tom Aikens is talking to me passionately about fish. "It's a huge environmental issue," he says, sounding more like a Greenpeace campaigner than a celebrity chef. "One day the world could run out of fish."

This is the new Tom Aikens. Gone is the volatile, firebrand image. The man in front of me is calm, focused and professional despite the fact that it is only 8am (he has a busy day ahead). A new marriage, to society heiress Amber Nuttall, has clearly brought contentment in his personal life. And there is another surprise. Aikens, one of the most gifted chefs of his generation, the man who was awarded a Michelin star for the second time last year, is opening a fish'n'chip shop, Tom's Place, in Chelsea next month.

The restaurant - his third - will serve fish from sustainable sources, including lesser-known varieties such as pollack, gurnard, ling and merim sole. There will be bouillabaisse, mussels, squid, lobster and line-caught sea bass, and big chips cooked either in beef dripping or vegetable oil. You can eat in or take away. And Tom's aim is to make all aspects of the business - from the furniture to the takeaway wooden forks - as eco-friendly and recyclable as possible. "I covered every possible detail," he says proudly. "It's been a real learning curve."

The menu will be delicious but simple. "Food today is like the class system," he says, "top restaurants cater to the top 1.5 per cent. I think food has become too snobby. It should be available to everyone, whatever class." Gourmet fish'n'chips, both sourced locally, served without pretension sums it up. It's worked for Rick Stein, whose Padstow chippie is always packed.

It's all a long way from the early days of Tom Aikens, the restaurant he set up with his first wife, Finnish-born Laura. It rapidly gained a reputation for complicated, precision-cooked dishes served ceremoniously over endless courses by waiters who hover at your back as you eat. Dining at Tom Aikens is the antithesis of picking up fish'n'chips on the way home.

It is in the basement kitchen of his eponymous Chelsea restaurant that we meet, surrounded by stacks of mops, vegetable-boxes and Evian bottles, not to mention birds being decapitated.

It would be very easy to read the 37-yearold redhead the wrong way. He has a reputation for having a ferocious temper and was accused of branding a trainee chef with a hot palette knife when working as head chef at Pied à Terre, an incident he claims was much exaggerated. In 2004 he was reported to have accused a client of stealing an £11 spoon from this restaurant. But in person, the words "hot head", "difficult" or "violent" do not come to mind. Wired, intense, maybe. Certainly, he doesn't take things lightly.

He openly admits going into therapy after the break-up of his seven-year marriage to Laura. For someone as tightly wound as Aikens, counselling wouldn't have been the easiest of tasks. He doesn't avoid the subject of his temper but speaks about learning to deal with stress and his new-found maturity with a lack of passion. "I had a lot of pent-up anger," he says flatly, referring to the months on the couch.

Looking back on his time at Pied à Terre he says the problem was he had no management skills. Communicating with staff was a form of verbal abuse. And as head chef, his own ego took a daily battering. "It was like the Army. You took abuse and it toughened you up. Then, when you got to be top honcho, you dished it out, that's basically how it worked." Today he talks about having words with his more temperamental kitchen workers. "It's important to have camaraderie when you're working long hours. We all have to be civilised to each other. We have to work as a team."

He is also learning to delegate. He has just hired an HR person for the restaurant. "I think this is a step in the right direction. We have a staff of 160 people and we have to be able to check on everyone, on their personal safety. We have to have someone on board."

This management-speak is all part of the new brand. After his famous sacking from Pied à Terre, Aikens had no choice but to become a private chef. It was a big step down from Michelin stars. The careful speech, the consideration for fellow staff, not to mention the obsession with the fishing industry and the environment is all the result of a lot of serious thinking.

I suggest that, in retrospect, failure was a sort of blessing. "Yes, I failed at my work. It was huge shock to me and other people," he says. No longer sleep-deprived or suffering from anxiety attacks, Aikens had time to think about what went wrong. "I was cocky, bullish, a control freak. I kept getting cross because I didn't know what to say. But I've mellowed and learned to communicate," he says.

He compares his cooking style, which has evolved from haute French to authentic English to his own personal development. "My cooking was tyrannical, contrived, impersonal, boxed in just like me," he said. Today it is "more flowing, organic ... I just put it on the plate". Therapy has changed the way he cooks, he says. It is now less formal and more authentic. Listing the provenance of the foods (included in the menus at Tom's Kitchen) is all part of this transparent school of cooking.

And, more importantly, he has just lured his identical twin brother Rob, also a chef, into the business. Rob has been working abroad for the past 14 years, in Canada and the States. The two are exceptionally close. When he was younger Aikens talked movingly about how Rob was the one person in his life he absolutely trusted. And he says Rob always had better life balance: while Tom was working 18-hour days as a young chef, Rob was out with models every night, enjoying the party circuit. "I stayed in London and he moved to Lake Placid and had this amazing quality of life."

Rob's return to London is obviously a major source of pleasure for Aikens. Rob even moved into Tom and Amber's Battersea flat for a time. And it's hard not to think his presence has been a major professional support. Because Aikens really is at the top of his game. His Michelinstarred restaurant, Tom Aikens, is full most nights. Tom's Kitchen, the more relaxed canteen he opened last year, is always packed.

Tom is the younger twin. A sickly baby, he weighed one kilo when he was born and spent his first two months in an incubator with a 50/50 chance of survival. "I was fighting for my life and I've been fighting ever since," he said recently.

Both boys grew up with a passion for food. Their father was a wine merchant, their mother a great home cook. By his own account, Tom was a hopeless student. "I wasn't the brightest or the most gifted. I was in detention a lot," he says.

When he told his parents he wanted to go to catering college, they were appalled. "In those days only stupid people became chefs," he says.

It wasn't easy when he started out. After working for free in good kitchens, Aikens gained a place under famous French chef Pierre Koffman of La Tante Claire. "If he was upset with you, he wouldn't shout. He would punish you. Still, I learned an enormous amount." He was hired as head chef at Pied à Terre where he became the youngest chef ever to win two Michelin stars, beating Marco Pierre White's record.

Out on the street, after the knife incident, he had no choice but to become a private chef, for clients including Andrew Lloyd Webber and Lord and Lady Bamford. The latter, whom he adores, "showed me that you could be more joyful", he says. The Bamfords also taught him about organic business plans.

Today, his personal life is far happier. Earlier this year he married Amber Nuttall, daughter of the late Bahamas-based billionaire baronet Sir Nicholas Nuttall. She now works in PR but was originally a cook who trained at Prue Leith. Later she set up a home-catering company with Marco Pierre White.

To source the fresh fish that Tom's Place will supply, Aikens spent months in the Bahamas, where his father-in-law was heavily involved in fishing conservation. Nuttall founded the Bahamas Reef Environment Educational Foundation in 1993, an organisation dedicated to marine conservation. Aikens says his journey started there, and has continued ever since.

The sea is an endless source of wonder to him. He grew up in a village called Cringleford in Norfolk, 40 minutes from the coast. "The beaches go on for miles. My father was an avid beachcomber and my grandfather, too, and I think I've inherited that." Before launching the restaurant he made many visits to fishermen in Cornwall - even making a film about them which he will screen for customers in Tom's Place.

He virtually has a PhD in fish - learning about farming, trawling, quotas, fishery offices and diseases. "You should read The End of the Line by Charles Clover [on the risks of overfishing]. It's fascinating," he says smiling. He wants to help fishermen and is planning to donate some percentage of every fish'n'chip dinner to the Fishermen's Mission. "I really want to do something to help," he says.

He is even passionate about chips. He favours starchy Lincolnshire spuds with names like Maris Piper. "What you have to worry about with chips is discoloration," he says deadpan, "and dry matter. There is a specific way of measuring dry matter which is done with a cylindrical tube. Ideally you want a reading of 21-22."

Far from wanting Aikens at home every night, Amber "drives me quite hard". They share a love of travel, food and the sea; children are definitely on the horizon.

Tom is opening a second branch of Tom's Kitchen in the City (Rob will be operations manager). And in addition to his green fish'n'chips shop, he is writing a book about fish and is launching a range of own-branded, pre-prepared food next month. Is he following the Gordon Ramsay business model? Only time will tell, but I suspect this is just the beginning of the Tom Aikens empire.

Tom's Place opens next month at One Cale Street, SW3, 11am-11pm.

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