While writing April’s monthly ingredients piece for the Evening Standard I ended up chatting with an amiable fishmonger in Barnes and the topic was wild salmon. The Scottish wild fish are becoming more numerous as the season progresses and he was saying that the price had moved from £55 per kilo to £50 and back to £55 in the last fortnight. To the home cook that means wild salmon will cost about £12 a head for a decent sized hunk and for the margin conscious restaurateur that translates as a price to the punter of £30 plus vat – over £35 a portion. Can a piece of fish ever be worth that kind of money? Surprisingly the answer is yes. When compared with the lean, toned flesh of a wild salmon the farmed variety is very much second best and how expensive something is depends very much on your viewpoint. By chance a rugby trip to the South West of France over Easter meant that I found myself wandering around the covered market in Biarritz. There were several fishmongers with magnificent displays and all proudly showing off wild Atlantic salmon from the nearby river Adour. And the price? 120€ per kilo – which by my maths means the French shoppers were paying around £100 a kilo for wild salmon. What struck me most keenly was a pang of jealousy, I wished that Britain had the kind of food culture where cooks would happily pay a king’s ransom for something that was truly excellent. You have to speculate that most Londoners would think the Barnes Fish Shop £55 a kilo for a piece of fish a bridge to far, so whatever would they would make of the £100 a kilo Biarritz price tag?

Some chefs have the culinary equivalent of perfect pitch, and often it is not the manner of their cooking so much as the way they put a menu together that makes for delighted diners. The skills on show at Theo Randall’s restaurant in the Intercontinental Hotel are exemplary but his menu planning is even better. Randall’s was the venue for the most recent meeting of the Tabasco Club – a loose association of hardened trouble makers that recruits its members from the restaurant business and the wine trade. It was the perfect Spring lunch:

Insalata di granchio – fresh Devon crab with Florence fennel, mixed Italian leaves, Tabasco aioli and bruschetta, very fresh crab, a perfect match with the crunchy slivers of fennel.

Cappelletti di vitello – delicate egg-yellow pasta with a rich veal and pancetta stuffing sauced with nothing more complicated than melted butter – delicious.

Costata di agnello – subtitled “wood roast spring rack of lamb with slow cooked peas, broad beans, mint and violet artichokes. Salsa d’erbe” Two double lamb chops perfectly cooked, pink and tender atop a splendid mound of peas, beans and artichokes (all the veg fresh and flown in from Puglia) with a chopped herb and mint salsa. I cannot wait until we have fresh English broad beans and peas, then I shall recreate this dish myself.

Amalfi Lemon tart - this was absolutely jaw-dropping, delicate pastry and a bright orange, quivering, lemony bit. Judging by the colour the filling must have been made using eggs with particularly orange yolks. It tasted remarkable – the perfect balance between sweet and sharp. A candidate for “Best-ever” status, which is all the more impressive as there are a great many magnificent lemon tarts out there.

Charles Campion

Barnes Fish Shop, 18 Barnes High Street, SW13 (020 8876 1297)

Theo Randall, Intercontinental,1 Hamilton Place, W1 (020 7409 3131)