Foodies' Next Frontier

Toronto Globe and Mail, 20/10/2004

Snail porridge? Parsnip cornflakes? Bacon-and-eggs-flavoured ice cream? British food sounds more disgusting than ever, and people are flocking from around the world to try it.

But the Fat Duck, a small restaurant a few kilometres from Heathrow airport, has been enticing a steady stream of adventurous diners across the Atlantic.

Some make it part of a business trip or vacation, others drop by on a tour of the top restaurants on Europe. Some even make the trip specially. As one diner (writing on a website www.londoneating.co.uk) put it, “my friend and I flew in from the States just for dinner at the Fat Duck. We could have saved money on our return flight and just flew home on the pure joy the whole experience filled us with.”

They come to eat salmon coated in liquorice jelly, sardines-on-toast sorbet, red-cabbage gazpacho, and chocolate dessert with popping candy (that sugary delight rarely enjoyed by anyone past the age of 12).

In short, they’re some of the most vile-sounding dishes ever to appear on a British menu. But the Fat Duck has just this year received the highest honour a restaurant can get: three stars in the famous Michelin Guide.

To top this off, it was recently named the No. 1 restaurant in Europe — and No. 2 in the world (second only to French Laundry, in Yountville, Calif.) — by Restaurant magazine.

The establishment is run by a largely self-taught chef, Heston Blumenthal. His public profile seems almost non-existent beside the pack of celebrity chefs who are a constant presence on British TV screens, such as Gordon Ramsay, Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson.

A father of three, Blumenthal talked him self to cook while working as a debt collector and photocopier salesman. He opened his first restaurant in 1995, building a reputation on serving traditional French food – steak and chips with Bordelaise sauce, or rillettes (a rich pate) of salmon, before branching out into an exploration of the most outre gastronomy.

But amongst the more daring class of diner, his food is spoken about in hushed tones. His methods challenge the inherited traditions of cooking, taking a scientific approach on how the brain perceives flavours, and how food behaves when it’s cooked. It’s a philosophy he calls “molecular gastronomy.”

This is illustrated by his search for the perfect French fry. How do you get the perfect crunchy, golden outside and fluffy white interior? He tried various unlikely techniques, such as drying the potato chips with a special machine called a desiccator, or perforating each one 25 times with a pin (even he dismissed that as too elaborate). Eventually, he settled on a complex three-stage process: Boiling them, then frying them twice at two different temperatures. According to the Observer Newspaper critic, “The best, most luscious chips” he had ever sampled.

Likewise, the bizarre flavour combinations aren’t just random. Things often taste good together because they have a similar chemical makeup, even if they sound like a strange mix. So the menu mixes white chocolate and caviar, or liquorice and asparagus. It may sounds odd, but it makes sense on the tongue.

And the psychology of food is just as important as the chemistry. Some of the dishes play games with the diner’s expectations, and how they affect the taste of something. Even the same mouthful can taste radically different if your expectations change half way through.

For instance, Snail porridge sounds like a deliberately disgusting joke. But if you’ve paid $70 for it in a top-end restaurant, you’re much more likely to enjoy it.

The Fat Duck’s cooking is full of perception jokes. One of the starters consists of two little blocks of jelly, one flavoured orange, one beetroot, one orange coloured, and one beetroot coloured. Of course, the orange one actually tastes of..... well, I don’t want to spoil the surprise. Let’s just say that when an ice-cream cone arrives that tastes of nothing stranger than old-fashioned Victorian-style ice-cream, it’s the biggest surprise of all.

Blumenthal also believes that hearing is the “forgotten sense” in eating, and that sound accentuates his customers’ gastronomic appreciation. Customers can now request a special set of headphones and a microphone that pick up every crunch and slurp.

The Fat Duck isn’t the only restaurant exploring new gastronomic frontiers. El Bulli, near Barcelona, has been exploring similar territory for some years, and the two are often compared. Run by Ferran Adria, El Bulli is only open half the year. The chefs spend the rest of the year researching new dishes.

A typical meal lasts around 30 courses, ranging from the improbable delights such as vegetable jellies or freeze-dried foie gras with consomme and tamarind, as well as versions of more classic dishes like risotto a la Milanese.

Together, they’ve started quite a trend in European food, as other restaurants follow up their ideas. I recently ate at a restaurant in Granada where the starter was a trio of gazpachos with constrasting flavoured ice creams floating in them, an unmistakable Bulli influence. And example, Midsummer House, near Cambridge, has even been nicknamed the Fat Duckling.

Midsummer house is run by Daniel Clifford, who gives his diners a leaflet describing his intent, and crediting his influences, including Adria and Blumenthal. The dishes credit his inspirations, too – popping candy shows up in the banana pudding, for example, or pink grapefruit and champagne foam. It has had some good reviews, but has a long way to go before reaching the stature of the Fat Duck.

The restaurant itself is unspectacular. Bray is a neat, well-preserved village, with a pleasant green, a few half-timbered Tudor buildings but not much else. It's the kind of place directors might shoot 30's period dramas. The restaurant is in a low-ceilinged room, decorated with some frankly rather unpleasant abstract oil paintings, primarily a kind of greasy yellow.

For get the surroundings, though – you're only here for one thing, the food. But however creative and mentally stimulating the thinking behind the food may be, it’s only worth it if it tastes good. I visited it for the first time this past summer with sky-high expectations, and it didn’t disappoint.

Some dishes, such as the parsnip cornflakes, were interesting, rather than actually pleasant. The best dishes, however, were sublime. A veal sweetbread in a pollen crust was utterly delicious. In one dessert, a combination of bacon-and-eggs ice cream, sweet toast and tomato jam assembled in homage to the traditional English breakfast, the different flavours fitted so perfectly together that the effect was astonishing.

For all this culinary creativity, the most delicious thing on the Fat Duck’s menu was the unpasteurised butter served with the bread before the meal began. This was how butter used to taste, I imagine, before industrial farming took half the flavour away. It was one of the most delicious things I have ever tasted. Sorry, Heston, but for all your scientific wizardry and Michelin stars, even you can’t improve on the simple fruits of mother nature.