FIRST of all, pertaining to last week's column concerning the lost jacket, I had a nice letter from a lady who had found it. She says she was glad to solve a mystery as to how someone had dropped a jacket without realising it. Perhaps when she found out who it had been she wasn't surprised any more. Anyway, thanks Mrs Curnow, for getting me out of a scrape. I absolutely loved an article I read the other day about a couple who, after looking forward to going to an exclusive restaurant to eat the chef's signature dish, were very disappointed in the result. The signature dish is a fairly new phenomenon. I should think at one time it was merely a dish the chef wasn't half bad at and a lot of people ordered. It may have been his or her own discovery, or a classic like steak and kidney pudding, but once news got round customers would book a table because of it. Then the chef would leave and everyone would quickly find out that the next one couldn't cook steak and kidney pudding to save his life and was now relying on baked cod in a Thai curry sauce to attract customers in droves. Now chefs have made their name, appeared on television and written books on the strength of one or more 'signature' dishes. It invariably is a dish which involved them putting a whole lot of unlikely ingredients together and creating something everyone raved over. Or said they did. I often have a feeling that we're into the Emperor's New Clothes land here. Nobody who has paid a large sum of money is going to spit out his Pernod braised quail encrusted with sun dried tomato breadcrumbs and accompanied by a parsnip and raspberry jus and say to all and sundry that it sucks. So, just to prove that signature dishes attract customers from far and wide, this couple had travelled quite some way to eat this particular chef's signature. Which surprisingly enough was fish cakes. Now I'm going to digress here again because I'm always quite surprised that humble fish cakes have risen to such grand heights as to be considered as even a tiny scribble of a signature. Fish cakes, at one time, came just slightly above rissoles or Spam fritters. Few people thought to rise them up to stardom, you just dunked a less than appetising looking piece of Spam in a batter and fried it until the outside was brown and crisp and the inside was still pink. Rissoles tended to be the minced up remains of the Sunday joint mixed with potato or anything else that came to hand, and similarly fried I have less than fond memories of fish cakes, which were always grey in colour because my grandmother always include the skin of whatever fish she used, usually cod. It was lucky in a way that I never experienced wartime fish cakes because then they might have contained whale, which, and do tell me if I'm wrong, was marketed under the name of 'snoek'. This was probably to prevent people realising that they were eating a relative of Moby Dick. In the same way my grandmother always called rabbit 'underground mutton' so as not to upset Beatrix Potter fans. My mother never said what snoek tasted like but she used to shudder. By the time I was considered old enough to experience my grandmother's fish cakes, whale was off the menu and whatever fish the fishman had on offer had replaced it. The fishman used to arrive by van on a Friday in our village, so this was really the only opportunity we had to buy fish and because we were one of the last villages on his round the choice was often sparse. My grandmother already had it in for him because he used to stop firstly at one end of the village and then move on to the other end. We were in the middle. She tried to persuade him to stop in the middle but he refused, and often, if she walked towards his first stop, he would be driving off at speed pretending he didn't see her frantic waving. He also refused to take orders, saying that people had let him down in the past and he didn't want to be left with a pile of uncollected fish, so my grandmother's plea for skate wings or a nice fillet of plaice was always turned down. By the time he reached us he only usually had cod, the odd piece of haddock, perhaps one herring and garish yellow smoked fish of unknown origin. Oh, and if we were lucky, pussy pieces, mainly fish heads and entrails in a leaking paper bag. He used to compound this error by listing all the species of fish he had started out with ' all fresh from the sea' which had been bought by eager customers at the start of the round. If this was designed to infuriate my grandmother it worked very well. We would have fish on the Friday, lightly poached in water, or rather my grandmother's version of light poaching in a big pan of furiously boiling water, which actually saved the bother of chewing, and the remains of the fish would be 'caked' the next day. These were mixed with mashed potato, no seasoning and then fried in lard, there being no such luxury as oil. If you've never had day old cod including skin and lumpy mashed potato beaten into submission in a flat cake and then fried in tepid lard you haven't lived. So back to the couple who were looking forward to a chef's special fish cakes, which were said, so to speak, to be a different kettle of fish altogether. Only they weren't. The couple were extremely disappointed because they found them to be tasteless and, having paid quite a lot of money for them, expressed their disappointment in a polite letter to the chef. Perhaps a letter of complaint might have been passed off, but the couple also had the temerity to include the wife's recipe for fish cakes, which, they said, were much more to their liking and actually had some taste. The chef, as chefs do, took umbrage and wrote back allegedly saying that it was obvious they didn't have any taste at all because they came from Wales. Which is why the story got in the paper in the first place. The chef had insulted these people's heritage and he wasn't even French, which might have been an excuse because there are still a lot of French people who are convinced that nobody who lives in the British Isles can cook or possibly understand good food. I thought it was wonderful. Not the chef's reply but the couple actually having the courage to do it. Why hadn't I thought of doing it when a meal is less than satisfactory? Like most people, I'm not good at complaining and in many a restaurant you usually have to run the gauntlet of drama as involved and emotional as a Shakespearean tragedy should you deign to point out that something is underdone, cold, doesn't taste all that fresh or, heaven help us, is not at all tasty. At best you'll often get a terse right lipped apology, a removed dish and a long wait. At worst, you'll get a visit from the chef all a quiver with indignation. The very worst thing is that the other diners, who have probably been thinking the same, are never on your side and either keep their heads down or nod understandingly at the staff to make sure everyone knows just who they are backing. A friend of mine remembers complaining justifiably about his icy cold meal and the manager turned around to the other diners and asked for a show of hands if they had any complaints. Nobody did, of course, and the manager looked triumphantly at my friend and say rather menacingly 'see, it's only you'. Sending a polite letter of complaint and an accompanying recipe to point out that your duck a la orange is far superior to their's could be the answer. Better still, you could deliver a sample, preferably during opening hours and share it round the rest of the customers. They say revenge is a dish best served cold, but sometimes serving it hot would be a better option.