A couple of months ago, the unthinkable happened: a British restaurant was voted best in the world. Months after obtaining three Michelin stars, Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck in Bray became the third restaurant—after Ferran Adrià's El Bulli and Thomas Keller's French Laundry—to top Restaurant magazine's annual "best 50" poll. On a recent Wednesday lunchtime, I visited the Fat Duck with my mother, a culinary traditionalist who generally despises fancy food. What, I wondered, would she make of Blumenthal's most famous inventions: snail porridge and bacon-and-eggs ice cream?
The Fat Duck is housed in a cottage-like building on a narrow street in the town centre. From the outside, it looks like any other provincial restaurant—an impression that is only partly dispelled upon entering. A makeshift hallway leads to a modest dining room, into which 20 or so tables are crammed. Wooden beams descend irregularly from a low-slung ceiling. Superimposed on to this structure, however, are the trappings of haute cuisine: wine glasses and gleaming cutlery; abstract paintings; an abundance of waiters.
We were seated next to a couple in their thirties. "Look, he's wearing a hoodie," my mother whispered. Other diners were less casually dressed. After some discussion, we rejected the à la carte menu in favour of the 12-course tasting menu, which costs £97.50.
Lunch began with a piece of theatre. A waiter appeared, holding a silver container trailing thick steam. Into this he squeezed a dollop of white foam from what appeared to be a silver aerosol canister. "Liquid nitrogen," he announced, turning the foam in the liquid with a couple of spoons. "Be careful: it is cold—minus 196 to 198 degrees." After a few seconds, he removed the foam and handed it to my mother on a plate, instructing her to swallow it in one gulp. This "instant meringue," as my mother described it, was frozen on the outside and semi-liquid inside. It tasted of vodka, lime and green tea.
A succession of amuse-gueule followed: a rock oyster suspended in passion fruit jelly; parfait of foie gras with quail jelly and langoustine cream; grain mustard ice cream in red cabbage gazpacho. These prepared us for the start of the menu proper. First up was snail porridge. Parsley-green, flecked with tiny strips of cured ham and embedded with plump snails, this came topped with delicate shavings of fennel marinated in walnut oil. It tasted not unlike an earthy risotto, and was much more normal-seeming than it sounded.
Two equally ingenious experiments followed: foie gras with almond fluid gel and sardines-on-toast ice cream. Then the main courses began. Compared to what preceded them, these were disappointing. Blumenthal's cooking seems most at home on the level of the dollop; on a larger scale, his inventiveness feels constrained. In a bizarre reinterpretation of a classic combination, poached salmon was served encased in liquorice jelly, accompanied by a vanilla-flavoured hollandaise. The dish seemed awkwardly poised between orthodoxy and experimentation. Had it been simpler—or bolder—it might have worked.
The puddings saw the return of Blumenthal's playful side. A dollop of black caviar served on a tiny disk of white chocolate was brilliantly improbable; next came a pine-flavoured sherbet fountain, with a vanilla pod for a stick. The joke failed to amuse my mother. "It's straight from a 1950s sweet shop," she said. "Frankly, I'm not impressed."
Two subsequent dishes won her round: a super-intense blackcurrant sorbet, and the finale—bacon-and-eggs ice cream. Tasting of bacon and eggs and nothing else, this was served alongside a morsel of French toast and a dollop of butter-textured caramel. An elemental combination of sweetness, richness and saltiness, it was the single most impressive thing we ate. "Heaven," my mother said, tucking into the caramel.
By now, the theme of our lunch was clear. The silver basin and aerosol canister used to make the liquid nitrogen mousse had been suggestive of shaving. By the end, despite all we had eaten, we only seemed to have progressed as far as breakfast. A regressive influence was at work. The menu could read either conventionally or backwards, beginning with the puddings and ending with the starters. All this topsy-turvy playfulness had a point: to emphasise the chaos-loving spirit at the root of Blumenthal's cooking. Behind the veneer of scientific seriousness, one senses a childlike desire to mix things up, to make a mess.
Blumenthal is often compared to Ferran Adrià, but it seems to me their styles are very different. Whereas Adrià's cuisine is rooted in the Catalan countryside, Blumenthal's cooking is rooted in the nursery and the sweet shop. Our meal was interesting—and immensely fun—but it wasn't especially profound. The Fat Duck almost certainly doesn't deserve to be considered the world's best restaurant, but as Blumenthal doesn't seem to be taking the award seriously, I don't think that this matters.
A final surprise lay in store. After we finished our coffees, the maitre-d' showed me the kitchen. I was expecting a capacious laboratory, but found two tiny rooms, both crammed with chefs. Our lunch had been prepared in a space no bigger than a pub kitchen. In a way, this seemed like the best joke of all.
