The finest restaurant in England

[fivemack]

There are restaurants that you go to when, of an evening, you feel it would be nice to have somebody else grill the steak, mash the potatoes and boil the peas for you.

There are restaurants that offer preparations you understand but wouldn't have had the patience to make of ingredients you've no idea where to acquire.

There are restaurants where you're no longer clear what's gone into the sauce served with your meal, save that it was a wonderful idea of the chef's.

And there's Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck, behind an unassuming stone frontage in the High Street of Bray. I went there on Tuesday with my brother, taking my return to England as an excuse for something we'd both wanted to do ever since news of the place burst upon the world in 2001.



Even the moderately vicarious foodie will know the shape of the menu degustation: the snail porridge, the salmon poached in liquorice, the sardine sorbet and the bacon-and-egg icecream, the tree-sap flavours, the cold meringues prepared in liquid nitrogen at your table. They'll know the scene-setting that three Michelin stars require: leather chairs, white linen, copious waiters explaining what each of the nineteen dishes making up the nine courses consist of, a sommelier with a vocabulary inaccessible to mortals, at each dish a fresh white-porcelain plate that chimes if the clean silver knife and fork you get should happen to knock against it.

I suppose all I can add is, the reviewers are entirely right. This is no longer food in the normal sense: in nine courses, there was one bone, an inch long, sticking essentially as decoration from a piece of perfectly-poached breast of pigeon. We were issued silver steak-knives owing more to the dagger, with an apis-style fly where the tang meets the handle, with several of the dishes, but I don't remember anything that couldn't be cut with the side of a fork. This is essences of food, distilled into jellies, mousses, sorbets, parfaits, pastillas, ballotines ...

I'm not listing the menu from memory: my memory's good, but the two bottles of exotic wine [a non-dessert Tokay particularly] have an amnesiac effect; you get a copy to keep as a souvenir, in an envelope of Barbour-jacket-waxed paper with a black seal.

Green-tea, lime and vodka frozen meringue to cleanse the palette. Beetroot jelly (orange), orange jelly (beetroot-purple). Oyster in a passion-fruit jelly with a horseradish cream. Grain mustard ice-cream in an essence-of-red-cabbage soup of a colour to redefine purple. Foie gras parfait on toast; a quail jelly with pea puree and a langoustine cream. The snail porridge: a perfectly rich parsley-green porridge with braised-to-disintegration ham and three peppery snails on top. Roast foie gras, with cherries, almonds, and cherry and almond sauces, and little cubes of amazingly intense amaretto jelly. Sardine-on-toast sorbet, with a little disc of mackeral boned so well you can't see where it was done. Poached salmon, coated with liquorice and served with asparagus. Poached pigeon, with a samosa-like fried-dough parcel containing pigeon confit spiced to taste like chocolate, and caramelised pistachios and bits of cocoa-bean scattered on the plate. A tiny cornet of a perfect apple ice-cream. A sherbet fountain, with a carefully hollowed vanilla-stick to suck up the pine-flavoured dust; enough to explain to me why people like smoking. A lychee and mango mousse, served with a mango and Douglas-fir puree, a blackcurrent sorbet so concentrated that you imagine a punnet of blackcurrents went into your single mouthful, and a marvellously refreshing pale tea jelly. A transparently fine rectangular carrot-and-orange biscuit, half a millimetre thick, on a stick; a couple of blackcurrent jellies. Thin corn-flakes made of parsnip, with a parsnip-infused milk. A glass of Buck's Fizz, in which the foam carried itself the concentrated essence of oranges. The bacon-and-egg ice cream, served with a pain-perdu which was the bread-and-butter pudding of childhood dreams coated in caramel and a lump of lovely soft caramel with a morel mushroom on top. 'Hot and cold tea', tea jelly delicately floated on a tiny cup of hot Earl Grey. A violet tartlet, black-purple with the savour of those violet-cream chocolates that grandmothers occasionally provide and of which one shameful Christmas I filched and ate an entire box. White tea served in amazingly heavy Chinese teapots. And finally, a taxi at the door.

It took five hours, and with wine it cost £250. Each. Not counting travel to Maidenhead or accommodation there. On another hand, that's a Mars-bar a day over the years we'd been awaiting it. We left still smiling with wonder; we dreamt that night of the food.


If you've ever read the reviews and thought going to the Fat Duck might be a good idea, you probably should; it is the kind of excess for which no excuse really suffices, and so for which no excuse should be used. Go there for itself; and, though the £90 for the tasting wines feels inordinate (neither of us took it up), it's probably the right thing to do. wine by the bottle, with the champagne so obligingly offered at various points in the evening, adds up to more than that, and besides one expects that comparable care was taken matching the wines as in making the meals.

Comments

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

It sounds like a lovely, ridiculously pretentious experience :-)

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Well, yes, unless restrained, my reviewing prose veers towards the purple, and this in particular seemed a situation not worthy of restraint.

It was like nothing on earth; an edible performance, a conjuring trick for the tastebuds, but certainly not something with which to compare normal restaurants, that serve things that look like slices of meat or fish with things that look like things that at some point grew.

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

jvvw posted about her visit there last year, but she gave none of the details. On refleciton, I think she may have been doing us a favour, for my eyes are now exceptionally green. Wonderful reading, at the very, very least. Social hypermobility strikes again; within my lifetime, a trip to the USA once seemed once-in-a-lifetime, but now Ryanair will whisk you abroad for the price of a London cinema ticket. If the heights of travel are now regularly scaled by all and sundry, are the heights of fine dining the next to be climbed? Will visiting the Fat Duck be the new visiting Goa? (And just how anine is the restaurant - does it live up to its title?)

I recall fondly your description of visiting a food festival on your travels and the quality of food served there. Is it at all possible or interesting to compare the two?

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

As I said to purpletigron, this is something that doesn't sit in the same spectrum as the normal restaurant; there's just so much focus on the tastes, to the exclusion even of texture. I'd rather have had this than had three more of the meal I had in Bangkok; but certainly I don't think I'd ever have this again. If nothing else, there was enough of a surprise element to it that I was slightly annoyed to have read in an earlier review of the carefully-confused colour of the two jellies.

There is nothing duckish about the decor, nor a cheerfully painted duck on the sign; the logo of the place, attractively engraved on the sign and on all the printed material, is a knife with a duck's beak for blade, a spoon with a duck's feather for handle, and a fork with a duck's fork for tines.

I have no idea whether what I did last night is more expensive in an inflation-adjusted way than it was for Oscar Wilde or Noel Coward to dine at the Ritz; of course, they were from strata far above mine.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

A duck's foot for tines!

Note to self: consider career paths other than copy-editor

[darcydodo]

My god. I keep staring at your words in wonder, not quite sure whether such a place and such food could actually exist for you to describe them. Any one of those dishes could be probably be found, I think, at the café attached to the Anthropological Museum of Worlds, but I don't think they'd have the same names there.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

That sounds like an institution in a Le Guin novel -- with globes of all the different worlds at the doors of the exhibition halls. I want one.

I also want Tom's dinner, but if I were prepared to spend 250 quid, or even $250, I could probably have that.

[del-c.livejournal.com]

I keep staring at your words in wonder, not quite sure whether such a place and such food could actually exist for you to describe them.

Tom hasn't described how the meringues are made, but I read that they pop one into the liquid nitrogen and scoop it out and onto your plate. And if you don't reach for it fast enough they snatch it away from you and make another, advising you to be quicker this time.

Heston Blumenthal is like the Mad Scientist of food. "And to think those fools at the Escoffier Institute threw me out for my theories... but I've shown them, I've shown them all! Ah-HAH-HAH-HAH-HAH!"

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Yes ... the waiter brings to your table a shining metal dewar, a glass bowl in a shiny metal enclosure, a shiny metal pressurised can, and two metal spoons. He pours LN2 from the dewar into the glass bowl, squeezes some mousse from the can into one of the spoons, and drops it into the LN2. It floats there; he bastes it with the other spoon occasionally, then takes it out and asks you to pick it up at once.

The outside is Canadian-winter cold rather than cryogenic, but very crispy on the tongue; there's enough latent heat there that the meringue does not fully liquefy in your mouth.

When I've seen LN2 ice-creams made before, the patter has always been very careful to point out that you should use a wooden spoon; I assume the metal spoons are something less conductive than silver, but I can still imagine the occasional frost-bite to trainee waiters.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Alien they certainly are, and you're exactly right about having to go to the anthropological museum; they won't the kind of thing you'd find at your local Enceledan or Callistan restaurant even when such things open. There were a multitude of dishes, each one essentially an amusement; from the pattern of Thai or Indian or Chinese restaurants, our culture tends to assimilate the feast-dishes of others, and I don't think I can imagine a culture which would have a scaled-up version of any of those dishes as the centrepiece of its feast.

It's like the first impression I had of Bangkok: 'as weird as Bangkok' turns out to be a fairly strict standard to which to hold the creators of alien worlds.

[emperor]

£250 each? for dinner? I am speechless.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

You know, I'm always amazed by the people who say this, but think nothing of spending £10 for an indiferent meal out, over and over again. Or £2 on a coffee, every day. For those who never eat out, then fair enough, but if you eat out even once a week, then you can stop. And in half a year, or a year at the most, you can have this one meal; and it will be far more memorable than all the others.

I want to go now...

Well...

[seawasp]

.... the thing is, that's, what, something like $400? Per person? For five hours? So... you're paying (assuming Self and Significant Other) about $160/hour for the entertainment. OTOH, that's over 20 brand-new harcover books, or Playstation 2 games (new release), or 40 two-person trips to the theater.

Some of the food sounded really interesting, but a lot of it sounded like something not really very good to eat (as opposed to prepared very well, which I have no doubt it was).

If I'm going to spend megabucks on food, that food will be the greatest tasting stuff I can possibly imagine, not "stuff that is simply too unusual or difficult to prepare for me to eat anywhere else", which is what a lot of that sounded like.

Re: Well...

[del-c.livejournal.com]

You probably have to be enough of a foodie to care about the taste and not whether the look squicks you. Blumenthal's mad-scientist genius (so I read) is that he's combining tastes, textures, and temperatures in ways no-one thought of before, to produce a "well, I never thought that would taste good!" A Salvador Dalí sort of trick, like furry cutlery, a lobster telephone, or a loaf of bread the length of a street.

If you're the sort of diner who says "Take that away, I don't like it" to something you haven't tasted but only looked at, you probably should keep your cheque book shut, and have another pizza instead.

Re: Well...

[seawasp]

Taste (and associated sensations like texture) are the ONLY thing I care about in food. Appearance is not relevant. I've eaten grasshoppers. I never say "I don't like that" to anything I haven't tasted. I started with a bland middle-American palate overall and I have learned to eat, and like, and cook, everything from TexMex to sushi to palak paneer. Any cuisine I haven't tried, I'm always willing to try.

However, I do have more than enough cooking experience and eating experience to guess what something may taste like. I've been occasionally wrong, but not usually. And things that involve, for instance, any form of liver (foie gras) tend to come in radically on the Bad side of the spectrum. I don't say it's impossible that a dish with foie gras could be worth eating, but -- like venison -- I've had an awful lot of varied experiences of people saying "but you just haven't tried it done RIGHT" and finding that their version of "done right" is just as bad as any of the others.

And experimenting with tastes like THAT is definitely NOT something I want to spend a month's rent on. I'd spend that much to be on the taste panel for the Iron Chef, though.

Re: Well...

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

According to Google and ebay, 2006 Superbowl tickets are $2000 for the worst available seat, tickets to the World Cup Final are $1200 or so, FA Cup Final tickets are actually close to unavailable. I admit that I paid for that meal a bit more than you'd pay for even good seats at the Royal Opera House, and a lot more than tickets to the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford. But at all those events you're a spectator and the marginal cost of providing one more seat is tiny; at the Fat Duck it's clear that you're consuming, albeit at an obviously large mark-up, a non-trivial quantity of costly and hard-to-source ingredients.

This food really was quite close to the greatest-tasting stuff you could imagine; I can't easily conceive of things to taste more wonderfully of blackcurrents, of amaretto or of tea.

Re: Well...

[seawasp]

Well, by comparison, I cannot think of any event I would pay a thousand dollars to attend, following my one attendance at Worldcon. Okay, the launch of a major space mission, maybe. The Superbowl and other events you mention are just examples of "... uh, WHY?" to me.

I'm not QUITE sure what you mean by "greatest tasting" above, though -- I get the impression you may mean something slightly different than I do when I say the same thing. For instance, if you don't LIKE amaretto, or tea, something tasting of them would be BAD tasting. (You mention wines, as an example: to me, there IS no wine -- and never will be -- worth the time to open the bottle. They taste of alcohol, and that TOTALLY overrides every other possible taste. I can't tell the difference between wine, beer, whiskey, champagne, and white lightning, other than by the presence/absence of bubbles and the strength of the "bite" from the alcohol concentration)

The way you phrase it above, it seems possible that you may mean "greatest tasting" in that the preparation was done in such a way as to bring out the true essence of some given flavor. This is not at all an insignificant accomplishment, but I personally would ONLY want to experience it with flavors I enjoy.

Re: Well...

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

That's cool; it's clearly not your sort of thing. I only engage when people suggest that paying that amount for a meal is somehow odd or wrong; not when they say it's just something they wouldn't do.

The chances of Mr Blumenthal doing this with a flavour I don't like, or am not at least interested in, is pretty damn small.

By a strange coincidence, I happened to have some perfectly cooked calves' liver last night. Odd, in fact, because it was the accompaniment to some wholly indifferent osso bucco*, and I was truly expecting it to be the other way round. Odder, because it's institutional cooking (I'm at Warwick Business School this week), though admittedly rather superior institutional cooking. Most of the food has been pleasant but unexceptional.

*the person doing the silver service had to be told not to leave the bone on the plate.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

The secret, then, to finding memorable food in the UK was to spend for one meal the price of my round-trip airfare?

That explains quite a bit.

Actually, I do remember quite vividly my trip to the Stockpot somewhere in London . . . .

The creaky chairs in the shaky loft greeted the diners with an anticipatory squeak, a forecast of the intenstinal rumblings that start somewhere, of course, on the tube to the hostel. Your menu is "printed" on a mimeograph sheet, the toner tang still lightly wafting from the copier paper, rough enough to deliver splinters to the unwary -- yet the most promising items on the fresh menus were half out of stock already. As a result, one ordered what would invariably be in any other venue the least spoilable -- the most canned, dried or frozen before preparation -- and tried to slip some protein under the out-of-stock radar. That excluded the fish from the beginning. I believe we had the "spagetti," a tour-de-force of noodles (well, pasta strings in various states of al dentrification) with spiced ketchup, instead of that fancy catsup sauce preferred by more upscale shelters.

(I could go on, but shouldn't. Your meal does sound wonderful. If only my bugdet had allowed!)

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

The UK does not have as strong a selective pressure against bad restaurants as one would hope, especially in the more tourist-ridden parts of London; for some reason, my country retains whole chains (Aberdeen Steakhouse particularly disreputable) which serve bad expensive food.

The Stockpot is notably dreadful, to the point that the first Google hit on it (http://www.london-eating.co.uk/3245.htm) is an interesting piece of vituperative invective. As that reviewer points out, for £15 a head all-in you'll get a better meal at a chain pizzeria, a neighbourhood Indian place, Wagamama's chain of noodle emporia, or even a hole-in-the-wall Chinese. And I admit that the meals I had with papersky and family in Canada, at that sort of price level or one notch below, were generally at least half a notch above that.

At the real-restaurant level, the food is certainly more expensive than in North America, but I've had some excellent experiences, at Number 22 in Cambridge and the Champignon Sauvage in Cheltenham to name two memorable ones.

[kalimeg.livejournal.com]

Well, the page has been edited to include what must be many sockpuppet reviews. No invective present.

[(Anonymous)]

Hi - welcome back to the UK! I enjoyed reading about your trip, and this sounds like an excellent and suitably bizarre way to celebrate your return.
Louisa

[sdn.livejournal.com]

papersky sent me here (hi, tom, i refriended you).

everyone can see the food here (http://www.pbase.com/jp_photos/lunch_at_the_fat_duck) ...

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Thanks for posting this. I'm now haunted by the question of how it might be possible to get something good out of salmon with licorice. I have a vague impression that there's an Indian spice which might reconcile them, Who has the courage for experimental curried salmon with licorice?