He appeared on television, including Great British Menu as one of its contestants and then one of its veteran chef judges.

[2][7] On 10 December 1999, a 19-year-old chef Marcus Donaldson was burned with a hot knife, and Aikens was accused of causing the incident.

Within a week, Pied à Terre's board of directors advised Aikens to take a break from work during the Christmas period.

[10] After his departure from Pied à Terre, Aikens worked for Pierre Koffman again at La Tante Claire of The Berkeley hotel for nine months and then as a private chef for rich clients like Anthony Bamford in Gloucestershire and Andrew Lloyd Webber.

[27] He closed the Chelsea location on 2 January 2020, citing "extremely challenging market conditions [and] staff and skills shortages".

[29][30] He sold his two remaining eponymous restaurants to TA Holdco Ltd, owned by Peter Dubens and David Till, leaving his suppliers (many of them small businesses) with unpaid bills.

[29] Aikens operated a fish-and-chip restaurant, Tom's Place, which only lasted from 6 February to August 2008 due to debt and negative feedback primarily towards the high price.

[28] Aikens appeared on the long-running cooking show "Great Chefs of the World" in the fourth episode of the fifth season, filmed at his Pied à Terre restaurant.

[34] He also appeared in Saturday Kitchen (first on 18 November 2006)[35] and then Iron Chef UK in late April 2010, competing against Judy Joo, Sanjay Dwivedi, and Martin Blunos.

[36][37] In the sixth series (2011) of Great British Menu, Aikens lost to Tom Kerridge in the judging round of the London and South East heat.

[38][39] In its eighth series (2013), alongside four other winning chefs (Aiden Byrne, Michael Smith, Daniel Clifford, and Richard Davies), Aikens served his winning dish (Chicken egg, egg chicken) as the starter course of the 2013 Comic Relief banquet at the Royal Albert Hall.

[48] Aikens's marriage to his then-business partner Laura Vanninen lasted from 1997 to 2004, one year after they established his first eponymous restaurant.

[3][49] Aikens married his partner of nine years Justine Dobbs-Higginson, a former Goldman Sachs banker, in Corsica in summer 2018.