Dining at the Fat Duck
An odessey in one part
By Brock Mills
Present:
Mrs Michelle Mills
Ms Kirsty Smith
Mr Steven Bennett
Mr Rick Green
Apologies:
Ms Leesan McLeish (ill)
An odessey in one part
By Brock Mills
Present:
Mrs Michelle Mills
Ms Kirsty Smith
Mr Steven Bennett
Mr Rick Green
Apologies:
Ms Leesan McLeish (ill)
They say it's not the best restaurant in the world, which quite frankly defies comprehension to think that a dining experience could be better; as far as a meal goes, this was the whole box and dice and batteries and whatever else you get with board games these days.
Since we came to the UK, Michelle and I have had very little in the way of responsibilities and lots of disposible income. Now for a younger man or woman in a city like London this could be a recipe for trouble, but we are grown up and adult like so instead we have found ourselves spending money on things like holidays and fancy meals. Not that we didn't treat ourselves occaisionally back home, but in London we have taken it to the next level.
The Waterway in Little Venice does an excellent Rib Eye Steak and a excellent Corn Fed Chicken Risotto. Terroirs near Trafalgar Square is routinely excellent, with very nice duck scratchings a selection of petite plats that are all good, even the ball of anchovies. Hotels in Mayfair are pretentious but deliver the goods and we even happened upon an excellent Ethiopian restaurant in Kentish Town one evening where they serve curries on a big pancake thing. We had a tasting menu at a restaurant in Stockholm, not for any special reason, but just because it sounded nice. Michelle has even begun to appreciate red wine! As with any amatuer who thinks they can keep up with the professionals we decided to try our collective arms at a true fine dining establishment and, when you are talking Michellin stars, why settle for 1 or 2 when 3 are on offer. So we decided on taking on Heston Blumthal and The Fat Duck. I'd floated the idea with Shell and Steve and Kirst, who all agreed it would be good, so I decided to just book for as many as we could and back fill the spots with whoever was will to come along and shell out for the not incosiderable tarrif. This is our story.
I shall start with the reservation. You can book 2 months in advance of the day you will be dining, which is to say exactly 2 months beforehand is the only time you can reserve a table. I booked a meeting in my work calendar so no one else would expect me to do anything and spent an hour on the phone trying to get through to the reservations desk. It was like trying to get tickets to a music festival, I just kept ringing and ringing and finally got through, only to sit on hold for about 15 mins listening to someone narrate a story about Humpty Dumpty, no doubt designed to ensure only those who really want the booking stick it out.
Finally I got through and requested dinner for 6. No worries, but 9pm is the only sitting we have available she said (The lady may not have actually said "No Worries" but you get the idea). There's basically a contract that you have to sign in blood to actually make the booking, including a holding fee of £100 which they sort of refund off your credit card when you confirm the reservation. Complex and involved but it gave us something to look forward to. I raised the flag to the potential diners who all accepted the invertation enthusiastically, especially Steve whom I suspect had been researching the wine list and had a strong buy recommendation on the good wines.
Dining that evening we had Michelle, Steve, Kirsty, Rick and Leesan. Leesan went to school with Pieta and we are all mates from Uni and Rick is another Aussie from down the pennisula somewhere who is engaged to Leesan. Leesan couldn't actually make it since she was close to death with the flu, which actually caused a bit of a ruckus as we tried to fill the empty seat - one does not let these reservations go to waste - but in the end just cracked on without her. As we met at Paddington station, the rest of us were as keen as a certain brand of mustard.
The restaurant itself is in a small village called Bray which is about 40 miles from London, so we headed out on the train to Reading where we booked some cheap rooms at the Novotel, about a 20 min drive from the village, and prepared. Michelle and I had spent the day cleaning up and finishing off moving out of our flat, so we had been a little bit stressed out earlier in the day. We had got all of our tasks finished though and it was hoped that dinner would turn a productive day into a great one.
Heston Blumthal has a pub in Bray village across the road from the restaurant so the plan was we would cab it out to the village about 7, have a couple of cheeky ones beforehand and then make a grand entrance for out 9pm sitting. That is what we did, although somehow we managed to get the bar tab to 50 quid in one and half hours for 5 people. Finally the hour arrived and with a few photos underneath the sign out the front, a knife, fork and spoon shaped from duck parts - clever! - we entered. The building is one of those ancient wooden framed jobbies they do so well in UK that was probably built in the 17th century and is all sagging beams and crooked walls. It fitted the theme of the night. We were all in very high spirits and keen with anticipation, partly because we'd worked ourselves up with how cool are we going to his place and all that, partly because we knew we were up for a fortune and partly because it was genuinely exciting to be eating there especially after we watched a couple of documentaries/reality style tv shows starring Heston and his cooking.
So we were completely in the thrall of celebrity and wern't we all very excited about it. The rule on cancellations is that you pay £100 per no show, so we hadn't actually informed them we were one short and on getting there we had to wait a little while as they reset the table for 5. We sat down and were introduced to the maitre'd, our waiters that would look after us; there was 2 of them and they alternated courses unleses the maitre'd was required for a particularly complicated peice of serving - I've a feeling he was the only one qualified to cook with the liquid nitrogen. That wasn't to mention the servers who would not say anything and clear the dishes en masse. Oh and then there was the young Frenchie sommilier who was in command of the wines.
So we sat down and they served us some bread and still water, which is usually bad idea as they sting you about £10 a bottle. But we were all still a bit over awed and got it anyway. The bread was very nice and they provide 2 types of butter, salted and unsalted, made in the kitchen of course. No little foil wrappers on the butter here! We all became butter connisuiers for 15 minutes as we analysed the different types and ate more butter on 3 bits of bread than I would usually eat in a month. The consensus was the salted butter was better. It is quite funny how much more attention you pay to something when it is served with a refined french accent and a description on where it came from and how it was made.
Now when dining on a Saturday night at this sort of place you dont really get to choose what to eat. They only serve the tasting menu which is a fixed cost, £130 per head, but where you do get some choice and the chance to show a little individual flair is the wines. There was a wine list book the size of the Times Atlas containing some extraordinary wines matched by extraordinary prices. Or, if one is so inclined, you can take the degustation option which consists of the good wines - £90 per head - apparently matched very well but not A1 quality, or the really good wines: > £90 per head. Now this may seem a lot, but there was 13 courses ahead of us and it was 1 glass of wine to every 1.4 courses. Generally the wines were not what you would expect. There were Pourtugese reds, a Bulgarian tokay, a Kiwi white and other assorted bits and peices.
Prudently, we all went for the good stuff.
So finally we got to the food. The first course was for the cleansing of the pallate with "Lime Grove". Old mate the maitre'd rocked up with his little wooden push cart trolley thing that would come to hold our attention like a tennis ball holds a dogs. On it this time he had a whipped cream dispenser, you know the sort with the little co2 cylinders that we used to set off as bombs, filled with a lime mousse, and a metal bucket filled with liquid nitrogen. He squirted a bit of the mousse mix into the nitrogen and sort of stirred it for 20 seconds. He then dusted it with this bag full of green powder that turned out to be green tea and served it on a plate, instructing us to put it in your mouth and kind of swallow it before it dissolves. The final piece of theatre was a spray of a lavender scented perfume thing in the air in front of your face just as it was eaten. But eaten isn't really the right word for how it is consumed. It was really cool - both literally and conceptually. This thing - a little frozen ball of deliciousness - just kind of vanishes in your mouth with a bit of freezer burn and all this cold smoke coming out of your nose like a dragon. The pallette was cleansed. It was tasty, fun and of course there was a wine that perfectly complimented the taste.
The next course was a sorbet, eaten with less excitement Lime Grove but it did allow us to relax, settle in the swing of things and treat it as a meal.
The next 4 hours was filled with more of the same, food presented in a way that you wouldn't dream of. Licorice poached salmon, fois gras, an unbelievably good wood pigeon with black pudding that was more like a delicate sauce than stodgy chunk of charcoal sausage. We ate truffle toast! The truffle toast was superb, even though it was the size of a stick of wrigleys chewing gum. It actually got to the point where you would think "well this particular dish is amazing, but I'm glad it's only the size of a 50 cent peice since to eat more of this would mean less of something else that might just be so good that I will lose my mind altogether, rather than just partially and temporarliy as is happening right now"
The sensory overload was something else. The tastes, smells and textures all conspired to deconstruct expectations and desires until you were at the mercy of the restaurant. And then, when you came to accept and appreciate the food, the wines stepped it. Now I am not afraid to admit I am hardly a wine connisuer, however much, on receiving a bottle of the second least expensive wine on the menu, one may make a scene of gargling and swishing, considering the tanins and generally making the waiter wait whilst ensuring the wine I had just ordered is up to my expectations. I do this, not for the exacting quality I have come to expect, but as a bit of show for my fellow diners or as a warning to the serving staff I am know my stuff and am not to be trifled with. I could probably pick a red from a white in a blind taste test. Once in Cuba, I almost sent back a bottle of wine that had just being opened (In the end we drank it after I decided that it wasn't corked or faulty from some production process, just of very poor cuba standard quality). I do, however, know what I like.
I liked the stuff we were served at The Fat duck. We drank a Hungarian tokay that smashed apart dessert wine expectations ingrained through years of Army dining in nights, which is to say not great expectations, in one mouthful. A portuguese red that was soft like a nerf ball, yet strong like a gorilla. A Marlborough Chardonnay that broke down years of predjudice to oaked Whites. A sake that tasted like sake, despite the waiter assuring us of its high quality "although traditionally served warm, we serve it cold so you can actually taste it". Oh well, they couldn't all be loved. If I were a bit more educated I could probably quote some poet or monk on the nature of wines and their ability to improve life or something, but I can't. All I can say is the wines certainly added to the enjoyment of the entire experience. And they assisted in getting us drunk which was a added, if not entirely unexpected benefit. 9 glasses will do that.
"So what was your favourite?" I hear everyone ask. Well there are 2 dishes that are forever burnt into my memory. The Not So Full English Breakfast was ace. In keeping with the theme of never matching a preconceived idea, breakfast was served for dessert. It began with a bowl of cereal that looked like cornflakes but was in fact parsnips with milk that wasn't milk. It was nice, but the real treat was the Egg and Bacon ice cream. Jaques, or whatever the Frenchie Maitre'd's name was, rolled his trolley over again. We all sat, rigid, eyeing it off and waiting to see what would happen next. He again produced the liquid nitrogen cooking bowl, but this time he had eggs with him. Accompanied by a little spiel about the special fat duck chickens and their special diet and methods of rearing etc etc, he cracked the egg into the nitrogen and sort of pushed it around a bit for 20 seconds or so. He then served in on a plate with some French toast with caramelised pancetta. It looked like ice cream. The texture was like ice cream, but it tasted like Bacon and Eggs! I knew this was coming up and thought "I wonder what bacon and eggs tastes like when it isn't actually bacon and eggs". The answer my friends was right here on the plate. Unfortunately the best description I can come up with is that it tasted like bacon and eggs. I loved it. Shell thought it was a bit strange.
The second one was name Sounds of the Sea. The serving staff attacked en masse, this time with two plates: on one sat a large conch shell with some headphones hanging out of it, on the other was what can only be described as the beach. There was sand. There were those funny seaweed things that spurt water when you squash them, There were peices of fish and, just to make it complete, foam that looked just like the froth left on the sand after a wave has broken and water retreats back into the ocean. Left alone by the waiting staff, we all put the headphones in, which was just a soundtrack of waves and seagulls squawking, and started to eat the beach. The sand was made of tapioca and tasted sweet. The fish was bits of white fish, perhaps smoked, or perhaps not, I can't really remember. The foam was delicious. I have no idea what the seaweed thing was made out of but it was tasty. It was quite surreal as we all sat in silence, listening to the waves crash and the seagulls carry on as we ate the scenery.
It was very, very good. If it sounds like I am carrying on a bit or perhaps laying it on a bit thick, which I am, it is deserved. This place really is like nothing else I had ever experienced as far as eating was concerned. And like a Beatles best of it was hard to pick a favourite, because each courses had some defining characteristic that made it memorable. Everyone enjoyed themselves immensely, so much so we hit the cheese board and got another bottle of red for good measure. When the time finally came for us to leave, which was 1:35am, we were very content. And then to top off the perfect night the minicab driver couldn't find our hotel and I got to have a vigorous debate about his knowledge of where he was in the world, his personal hygiene and many other interesting topics. It was the icing on the cake, where the cake was a beach and the icing looked like seaweed.
Since we came to the UK, Michelle and I have had very little in the way of responsibilities and lots of disposible income. Now for a younger man or woman in a city like London this could be a recipe for trouble, but we are grown up and adult like so instead we have found ourselves spending money on things like holidays and fancy meals. Not that we didn't treat ourselves occaisionally back home, but in London we have taken it to the next level.
The Waterway in Little Venice does an excellent Rib Eye Steak and a excellent Corn Fed Chicken Risotto. Terroirs near Trafalgar Square is routinely excellent, with very nice duck scratchings a selection of petite plats that are all good, even the ball of anchovies. Hotels in Mayfair are pretentious but deliver the goods and we even happened upon an excellent Ethiopian restaurant in Kentish Town one evening where they serve curries on a big pancake thing. We had a tasting menu at a restaurant in Stockholm, not for any special reason, but just because it sounded nice. Michelle has even begun to appreciate red wine! As with any amatuer who thinks they can keep up with the professionals we decided to try our collective arms at a true fine dining establishment and, when you are talking Michellin stars, why settle for 1 or 2 when 3 are on offer. So we decided on taking on Heston Blumthal and The Fat Duck. I'd floated the idea with Shell and Steve and Kirst, who all agreed it would be good, so I decided to just book for as many as we could and back fill the spots with whoever was will to come along and shell out for the not incosiderable tarrif. This is our story.
I shall start with the reservation. You can book 2 months in advance of the day you will be dining, which is to say exactly 2 months beforehand is the only time you can reserve a table. I booked a meeting in my work calendar so no one else would expect me to do anything and spent an hour on the phone trying to get through to the reservations desk. It was like trying to get tickets to a music festival, I just kept ringing and ringing and finally got through, only to sit on hold for about 15 mins listening to someone narrate a story about Humpty Dumpty, no doubt designed to ensure only those who really want the booking stick it out.
Finally I got through and requested dinner for 6. No worries, but 9pm is the only sitting we have available she said (The lady may not have actually said "No Worries" but you get the idea). There's basically a contract that you have to sign in blood to actually make the booking, including a holding fee of £100 which they sort of refund off your credit card when you confirm the reservation. Complex and involved but it gave us something to look forward to. I raised the flag to the potential diners who all accepted the invertation enthusiastically, especially Steve whom I suspect had been researching the wine list and had a strong buy recommendation on the good wines.
Dining that evening we had Michelle, Steve, Kirsty, Rick and Leesan. Leesan went to school with Pieta and we are all mates from Uni and Rick is another Aussie from down the pennisula somewhere who is engaged to Leesan. Leesan couldn't actually make it since she was close to death with the flu, which actually caused a bit of a ruckus as we tried to fill the empty seat - one does not let these reservations go to waste - but in the end just cracked on without her. As we met at Paddington station, the rest of us were as keen as a certain brand of mustard.
The restaurant itself is in a small village called Bray which is about 40 miles from London, so we headed out on the train to Reading where we booked some cheap rooms at the Novotel, about a 20 min drive from the village, and prepared. Michelle and I had spent the day cleaning up and finishing off moving out of our flat, so we had been a little bit stressed out earlier in the day. We had got all of our tasks finished though and it was hoped that dinner would turn a productive day into a great one.
Heston Blumthal has a pub in Bray village across the road from the restaurant so the plan was we would cab it out to the village about 7, have a couple of cheeky ones beforehand and then make a grand entrance for out 9pm sitting. That is what we did, although somehow we managed to get the bar tab to 50 quid in one and half hours for 5 people. Finally the hour arrived and with a few photos underneath the sign out the front, a knife, fork and spoon shaped from duck parts - clever! - we entered. The building is one of those ancient wooden framed jobbies they do so well in UK that was probably built in the 17th century and is all sagging beams and crooked walls. It fitted the theme of the night. We were all in very high spirits and keen with anticipation, partly because we'd worked ourselves up with how cool are we going to his place and all that, partly because we knew we were up for a fortune and partly because it was genuinely exciting to be eating there especially after we watched a couple of documentaries/reality style tv shows starring Heston and his cooking.
So we were completely in the thrall of celebrity and wern't we all very excited about it. The rule on cancellations is that you pay £100 per no show, so we hadn't actually informed them we were one short and on getting there we had to wait a little while as they reset the table for 5. We sat down and were introduced to the maitre'd, our waiters that would look after us; there was 2 of them and they alternated courses unleses the maitre'd was required for a particularly complicated peice of serving - I've a feeling he was the only one qualified to cook with the liquid nitrogen. That wasn't to mention the servers who would not say anything and clear the dishes en masse. Oh and then there was the young Frenchie sommilier who was in command of the wines.
So we sat down and they served us some bread and still water, which is usually bad idea as they sting you about £10 a bottle. But we were all still a bit over awed and got it anyway. The bread was very nice and they provide 2 types of butter, salted and unsalted, made in the kitchen of course. No little foil wrappers on the butter here! We all became butter connisuiers for 15 minutes as we analysed the different types and ate more butter on 3 bits of bread than I would usually eat in a month. The consensus was the salted butter was better. It is quite funny how much more attention you pay to something when it is served with a refined french accent and a description on where it came from and how it was made.
Now when dining on a Saturday night at this sort of place you dont really get to choose what to eat. They only serve the tasting menu which is a fixed cost, £130 per head, but where you do get some choice and the chance to show a little individual flair is the wines. There was a wine list book the size of the Times Atlas containing some extraordinary wines matched by extraordinary prices. Or, if one is so inclined, you can take the degustation option which consists of the good wines - £90 per head - apparently matched very well but not A1 quality, or the really good wines: > £90 per head. Now this may seem a lot, but there was 13 courses ahead of us and it was 1 glass of wine to every 1.4 courses. Generally the wines were not what you would expect. There were Pourtugese reds, a Bulgarian tokay, a Kiwi white and other assorted bits and peices.
Prudently, we all went for the good stuff.
So finally we got to the food. The first course was for the cleansing of the pallate with "Lime Grove". Old mate the maitre'd rocked up with his little wooden push cart trolley thing that would come to hold our attention like a tennis ball holds a dogs. On it this time he had a whipped cream dispenser, you know the sort with the little co2 cylinders that we used to set off as bombs, filled with a lime mousse, and a metal bucket filled with liquid nitrogen. He squirted a bit of the mousse mix into the nitrogen and sort of stirred it for 20 seconds. He then dusted it with this bag full of green powder that turned out to be green tea and served it on a plate, instructing us to put it in your mouth and kind of swallow it before it dissolves. The final piece of theatre was a spray of a lavender scented perfume thing in the air in front of your face just as it was eaten. But eaten isn't really the right word for how it is consumed. It was really cool - both literally and conceptually. This thing - a little frozen ball of deliciousness - just kind of vanishes in your mouth with a bit of freezer burn and all this cold smoke coming out of your nose like a dragon. The pallette was cleansed. It was tasty, fun and of course there was a wine that perfectly complimented the taste.
The next course was a sorbet, eaten with less excitement Lime Grove but it did allow us to relax, settle in the swing of things and treat it as a meal.
The next 4 hours was filled with more of the same, food presented in a way that you wouldn't dream of. Licorice poached salmon, fois gras, an unbelievably good wood pigeon with black pudding that was more like a delicate sauce than stodgy chunk of charcoal sausage. We ate truffle toast! The truffle toast was superb, even though it was the size of a stick of wrigleys chewing gum. It actually got to the point where you would think "well this particular dish is amazing, but I'm glad it's only the size of a 50 cent peice since to eat more of this would mean less of something else that might just be so good that I will lose my mind altogether, rather than just partially and temporarliy as is happening right now"
The sensory overload was something else. The tastes, smells and textures all conspired to deconstruct expectations and desires until you were at the mercy of the restaurant. And then, when you came to accept and appreciate the food, the wines stepped it. Now I am not afraid to admit I am hardly a wine connisuer, however much, on receiving a bottle of the second least expensive wine on the menu, one may make a scene of gargling and swishing, considering the tanins and generally making the waiter wait whilst ensuring the wine I had just ordered is up to my expectations. I do this, not for the exacting quality I have come to expect, but as a bit of show for my fellow diners or as a warning to the serving staff I am know my stuff and am not to be trifled with. I could probably pick a red from a white in a blind taste test. Once in Cuba, I almost sent back a bottle of wine that had just being opened (In the end we drank it after I decided that it wasn't corked or faulty from some production process, just of very poor cuba standard quality). I do, however, know what I like.
I liked the stuff we were served at The Fat duck. We drank a Hungarian tokay that smashed apart dessert wine expectations ingrained through years of Army dining in nights, which is to say not great expectations, in one mouthful. A portuguese red that was soft like a nerf ball, yet strong like a gorilla. A Marlborough Chardonnay that broke down years of predjudice to oaked Whites. A sake that tasted like sake, despite the waiter assuring us of its high quality "although traditionally served warm, we serve it cold so you can actually taste it". Oh well, they couldn't all be loved. If I were a bit more educated I could probably quote some poet or monk on the nature of wines and their ability to improve life or something, but I can't. All I can say is the wines certainly added to the enjoyment of the entire experience. And they assisted in getting us drunk which was a added, if not entirely unexpected benefit. 9 glasses will do that.
"So what was your favourite?" I hear everyone ask. Well there are 2 dishes that are forever burnt into my memory. The Not So Full English Breakfast was ace. In keeping with the theme of never matching a preconceived idea, breakfast was served for dessert. It began with a bowl of cereal that looked like cornflakes but was in fact parsnips with milk that wasn't milk. It was nice, but the real treat was the Egg and Bacon ice cream. Jaques, or whatever the Frenchie Maitre'd's name was, rolled his trolley over again. We all sat, rigid, eyeing it off and waiting to see what would happen next. He again produced the liquid nitrogen cooking bowl, but this time he had eggs with him. Accompanied by a little spiel about the special fat duck chickens and their special diet and methods of rearing etc etc, he cracked the egg into the nitrogen and sort of pushed it around a bit for 20 seconds or so. He then served in on a plate with some French toast with caramelised pancetta. It looked like ice cream. The texture was like ice cream, but it tasted like Bacon and Eggs! I knew this was coming up and thought "I wonder what bacon and eggs tastes like when it isn't actually bacon and eggs". The answer my friends was right here on the plate. Unfortunately the best description I can come up with is that it tasted like bacon and eggs. I loved it. Shell thought it was a bit strange.
The second one was name Sounds of the Sea. The serving staff attacked en masse, this time with two plates: on one sat a large conch shell with some headphones hanging out of it, on the other was what can only be described as the beach. There was sand. There were those funny seaweed things that spurt water when you squash them, There were peices of fish and, just to make it complete, foam that looked just like the froth left on the sand after a wave has broken and water retreats back into the ocean. Left alone by the waiting staff, we all put the headphones in, which was just a soundtrack of waves and seagulls squawking, and started to eat the beach. The sand was made of tapioca and tasted sweet. The fish was bits of white fish, perhaps smoked, or perhaps not, I can't really remember. The foam was delicious. I have no idea what the seaweed thing was made out of but it was tasty. It was quite surreal as we all sat in silence, listening to the waves crash and the seagulls carry on as we ate the scenery.
It was very, very good. If it sounds like I am carrying on a bit or perhaps laying it on a bit thick, which I am, it is deserved. This place really is like nothing else I had ever experienced as far as eating was concerned. And like a Beatles best of it was hard to pick a favourite, because each courses had some defining characteristic that made it memorable. Everyone enjoyed themselves immensely, so much so we hit the cheese board and got another bottle of red for good measure. When the time finally came for us to leave, which was 1:35am, we were very content. And then to top off the perfect night the minicab driver couldn't find our hotel and I got to have a vigorous debate about his knowledge of where he was in the world, his personal hygiene and many other interesting topics. It was the icing on the cake, where the cake was a beach and the icing looked like seaweed.
The Menu
TBC
References
www.fatduck.co.uk
TBC
References
www.fatduck.co.uk
1 comment:
Wow! It's about bloody time that you did a decent food blog! That was incredible. I think I might send it to Matt Preston at Delicious, Brock! You have a real flair for food writing, believe me, I have read many descriptions, but you have a talent for it. Maybe you can be a food writer and you can be flown back there one day and you can take your darling little sister! ox
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