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The finest restaurant in England
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.
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.
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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?
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Well...
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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!)
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(Anonymous) 2006-01-21 10:28 pm (UTC)(link)Louisa
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everyone can see the food here (http://www.pbase.com/jp_photos/lunch_at_the_fat_duck) ...
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