GOOD TIMES:BRAY, A blink-and-you-miss-it village down a back road in Berkshire, is an odd little place. Despite being a mere stone's throw from Heathrow, it is quintessentially Olde England and as twee as a Laura Ashley petticoat. Yet it attracts tens of thousands of starry-eyed pilgrims each year. They flock here not, as you might imagine, to admire its manicured rosebushes, chocolate-box Tudor houses or lichen-crusted graveyard.
The real source of its fascination is that it boasts two triple-Michelin-starred restaurants – Michel Roux’s pantheon of French classicism, The Waterside Inn, and Heston Blumenthal’s temple to molecular gastronomy, the Fat Duck. It is to experience lunch at the Fat Duck – second only to Ferran Adrià’s el Bulli in the list of best eateries on the planet, according to the San Pellegrino World’s Best 50 Restaurants – that has brought me here.
The Fat Duck, unlike the food it serves, is rather nondescript and understated. Indeed, I walked right past it twice. Other than the minimal menu on the exterior wall, it looks exactly like a humble, low-ceilinged cottage.
Appearances can be deceptive, however. Inside, it is a bustling hive of activity. And while the atmosphere is cosy and relaxed, there is a palpable air of eager anticipation among the 40 or so diners crammed under its polished wooden beams.
There is no choice at the Fat Duck, only a 12-course tasting menu costing £150 (€166) a head. The price is probably the least shocking thing about the place.
For Blumenthal is engaged on something of a Proustian quest to trigger our memories through smell, taste, touch and sounds. An innovative culinary alchemist, he applies the scientific knowledge he has acquired through years of research to transmogrify food into ever more fantastic dishes, employing such uncheffy tools as centrifuges, freeze-driers and vacuum chambers to do so.
The ceremony begins with a nitro-poached green tea and lime mousse, a delicate frozen ball of meringue that is “cooked” at the table in a bubbling vat of liquid nitrogen before being popped on the tongue, where it explodes with an immense, almost breathtaking, rush of flavour.
It is followed by a startlingly vivid red cabbage gazpacho with Pommery grain mustard ice-cream and jelly of quail with cream of crayfish, chicken liver parfait, oak moss and truffle toast, which arrived with a fog-spurting wooden box of moss, to evoke the smells of the forest from whence the truffles originated. It’s very clever – and a complete hoot.
As you'll have gathered, dining chez Heston is highly theatrical. The confident, well briefed staff deliver little explanatory speeches before many of the courses. Take the Mock Turtle Soup, for example. We are handed extracts from Alice in Wonderlandto read before being presented with a gold-plated "watch" in a teacup which dissolves as hot water is poured on to it, forming a Madeira-rich consommé. We are then instructed to pour the consommé into another bowl containing a fake turtle egg and a "caterpillar"of terrine of ox-tongue. The caterpillar of the book, chuffing heavily on his hookah, could hardly have been more narcotised than I was by this bizarre rigmarole.
Then came Sound of the Sea, an edible reconstruction of a beach, which comes with an iPod in a shell that plays the sound of seagulls and gently crashing waves. The aim is to bring you back to the halcyon days of your childhood, faffing about in the sand with a bucket and spade.
Ironically, my three favourite courses were those that arrived with least fanfare. The roast foie gras with braised konbu, crab biscuit and rhubarb gel was eye-poppingly good, while the powdered Anjou pigeon with blood pudding and confit of umbles – pigeon hearts, to you and me – had me begging for more.
The taffety tart – an almost meaty slab of dense, caramelised apple with fennel, rose, candied lemon and blackcurrant ice-cream– was to die for.
Overall, the bizarre brain of Blumenthal made for an experience that was magical, barely comprehensible and, dare I say it, a tad silly in places. That said, to be truly enjoyed, all great theatre requires the audience to lose itself in the moment and suspend cynicism. Thus it is with the Fat Duck. And enjoy it I did. Thoroughly.
Obviously, such high culinary art is not for everyone. Sometimes, all you really want is a pie and a pint. Which is why Blumenthal also runs the Hinds’ Head Hotel, where his relentless pursuit of excellence is focused on producing astoundingly good pub grub.
Unlike its more famous sibling, the Hind’s Head is easy to find. It dominates Bray’s High Street, beckoning passers-by to quaff heartily from tankards of frothy ale in its cosy, timbered alcoves. The day after having our senses blasted by the genius of the Fat Duck, Mrs Doyle and I are ready for something homely and duly answer the Hind’s Head’s call.
The menu is a list of deceptively simple, reasonably priced classics, such as pea and ham soup, shepherd’s pie, oxtail and kidney pudding and lemon sole with parsley and capers. The exquisitely plump potted shrimps and chicken, ham and leek pie has herself swooning with pleasure while I attack my huge slab of butter-soft steak, with its accompanying triple-cooked chips and gloopy sauce of bone marrow globules, with the gusto of a starving pit bull.
Blumenthal has, in the past, produced a BBC TV series entitled In Search of Perfection. I reckon he's found it with his chips. Crispier than broken glass on the exterior and fluffy as a lamb's oxters inside, they are so good that it is beyond the meagre imaginations of a mere mortal such as I to conceive of how they could possibly be better. Equally brilliant are the Banbury cakes with Stilton – and the Sussex Pond Pudding, a blob of sponge, lemon curd, caramel and double cream that is as comforting as a mother's embrace.
The kitchen also offers snacks such as Scotch quail’s eggs, which, with their crisp coatings and unctuous, runny yolks, are a technical and gastronomic masterpiece and quite possibly worth the trip to Bray on their own.
After lunch, I collar Blumenthal at his development kitchen, where the real sorcery happens. I delicately broach the fact that, as a leading light of a modern gastronomic revolution pushing the boundaries far beyond the realms of cuisine classicism, he gets sniped at by some purists for being too extreme, for dragging cooking out of the kitchen and into the alien environs of the laboratory where, they claim, it doesn’t belong.
He bristles, if only ever so slightly. Some of the equipment and techniques he employs may seem outlandish, he argues, but so were glass lemon juicers, electric whisks and microwaves when they were first introduced. “If you follow the argument against what I’m doing to its logical conclusion, we should just go back to roasting slabs of meat over open fires and not try anything else. And where’s the fun in that?”
My sentiments exactly.
- fatduck.co.uk; thehindsheadhotel.com
