The Fat Duck

Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck has been on our wish list for at least three years. We have heard fascinating tales about his alchemy with food and his flair for making dinner a theatrical event. A planned trip to the UK gave us the time but getting a booking was not simple. The restaurant accepts bookings exactly two months ahead but no further than that. So to secure our booking on Wednesday the 17th February we attempted to ring the restaurant at 10am on Wednesday the 17th December. We rang at about 10:05am UK time but couldn't get through. By the time we got a ring tone at about 10:10am all available seating was gone.

Not to be deterred we contacted a good friend in Maidenhead and asked her to try the next day. She persevered for 90 minutes on a constant redial, was then put on hold for 15 minutes and finally secured the very last available table for the evening of Thursday the 18th February. Not as Herculean a feat as getting in to El Bulli but not exactly easy either! We then had two months to peruse the Big Fat Duck cookbook and get excited.

So, two months later, how can we describe the Fat Duck?

It was more like an evening at the theatre than a meal in the traditional sense. It featured a lot of very skinny, mostly French waiters performing delicate feats of “cooking” in front of us in baths of steaming liquid nitrogen. We tasted some phenomenal flavours and enjoyed the addition of scents and even sound to some courses. Our “Sound of the Sea” course came with an iPod in a conch shell to play a sea sound track while we ate the extremely fishy/foamy and salty accompanying dish (not a hit with our friends although my fellow reviewer quite liked it.)

There was a delightful sense of play to a lot of the dishes. Our Mad Hatter’s Tea Mock Turtle Soup came with an accompanying poem from Alice in Wonderland on a souvenir bookmark and a tea cup which had the Mad Hatter's gold watch dangling in it. Our cup was filled with hot water from a lovely kettle and we had to stir. The “watch” dissolved into flakes of gold leaf containing a stock which flavoured our water. We then poured this into the accompanying bowl and voilà: Mock Turtle Soup.

Some of the less playful dishes focussed more on extremes of taste. The roast foie gras with rhubarb, braised konbu (seaweed) and crab biscuit was superb. The creamy richness of the foie gras contrasted superbly with the acidity of the rhubarb and the intense "crabbiness" of the accompanying biscuit.

One of our friends also had an epiphany over the Jelly of Quail, Crayfish Cream, Chicken Liver Parfait, Oak Moss and Truffle Toast. This dish, an homage to Alain Chapel, was served in a porcelain egg and layered into intense flavour bands that each formed a mini explosion on your taste buds. I appreciated each of the different layers, but wasn't sure about the overall combination. We ate the dish while a bed of oak moss sat in the middle of the table "smoking" gently with liquid nitrogen and adding its woody, damp smell to the experience.

One of the dishes I had been most apprehensive about was the Salmon Poached in Liquorice with Artichokes, Vanilla Mayonnaise, Golden Trout Roe and Manni Olive Oil but in fact this was another highlight of the evening. The Liquorice had flavoured the salmon skin but in a very subtle manner and any aniseed overkill was soothed by the tasty vanilla mayonnaise.

Powdered Anjou Pigeon with Blood Pudding and Confit of Umbles, Red Cabbage Gazpacho with Pommery Grain Mustard Ice Cream and Nitro Poached Green Tea and Lime Mousse complete with a spray of lime essence to scent the air were the other dishes in our Mad Hatter's feast. Heston Blumenthal is a genius in his obsessive search for flavour sensations and new ways to recreate ancient recipes with a twist (the pigeon dish was inspired by a recipe from the 1720s).

Another fun part of the meal was the Whisk(e)y Wine Gums course – coming in the form of miniature bottles attached to a Perspex map showing where in Scotland and the US the Whiskies in question came from. I gobbled mine fairly indiscriminately while the men at our table took their time and tasted judiciously. We all agreed that the Laphroaig wine gum was truly horrid!

Dessert was fun too. It was called “Like a Kid in a Sweet Shop”. We were given a beautiful pink and white striped paper bag full of technically clever and fabulous sweets. There was one caramel (with an edible wrapper) that tasted amazingly like apple pie, and a wonderful edible playing card filled with some sort of raspberry jam called the Queen of Tarts.

The famous bacon and egg ice cream was also divine. The waiter cracked the “eggs” at the table and then “scrambled” the eggs in liquid nitrogen before serving them on top of some stunning mini French Toast and placing a “bacon” slice on top. Of course they weren't real eggs and it wasn’t real bacon (although being a Blumenthal creation it was a concentrated burst of bacon essence produced by time consuming processes and a lot of pancetta and high grade pork products) but it was very tasty!

In terms of creativity and inventive brilliance Heston Blumenthal's restaurant surely deserves its three Michelin stars and many other awards. If I have a criticism to make of the Fat Duck it is that Blumenthal often appears to be more interested in the theatrical impact of a dish than in its taste. With dishes like the Sounds of the Sea effort went into creating mock foam and "sand" that were intensely flavoured but not actually what I would term delicious. The danger would seem to be that Blumenthal will create madder and ever more theatrical creations that no-one actually enjoys eating. However at this point in time there are enough taste sensations at the Fat Duck to make the theatrical aspect an added thrill rather than a distracting gimmick.