The Fat Duck, Bray

What must it be like, I wonder, being told you’re the best in the world? Or rather, what must it be like to believe it? It has to be a somewhat surreal experience for the staff at the Fat Duck, as they polish the cutlery and vacuum the carpets and shake down the tablecloths, to be aware essentially that this is it. Nobody in the world does this, this restaurant thing, any better. Anywhere. The front of house may appear charming and down to earth, like serving eggs cooked in liquid nitrogen and edible playing cards is the most natural thing in the world, but do you think behind the easy manner and practised ease of service there’s a twinkle of pride, that they really know how good they are? Do they even care?

Of course, people will try and tell you that El Bulli, at least until later this year when it permanently closes its doors to the paying public and relaunches as Ferran Adria’s Convalescent Home for the Culinarily Insane, is better. This is absolute rubbish. Not one of the bizarre and often downright disgusting “dishes” I ate in Spain last September could match even the weakest of the fabulous plates of food we were served yesterday afternoon at the Fat Duck. El Bulli serves toy food, technically impressive but vacuous experiments in form and texture, with all the personality of an eight-year-old with ADHD. The Fat Duck is a proper restaurant, its inventions never ever coming at the expense of form or flavour, and the warmth and wit of every element of every course had us grinning and giggling and cooing. Let’s start at the beginning.



A “palate cleanser”, lime mousse poached in liquid nitrogen and sprinkled with green tea dust, was an extraordinary sensation. The intense cold was shocking, and if you ate it soon enough after it came out of the nitrogen bath you could blow great white clouds of lime-scented smoke out of your nostrils. Hilarious, and most importantly, delicious.


Red cabbage gazpacho with mustard ice cream was a balancing act of vinegar and salt, and one which worked magnificently. First to register was the mustard ice cream, giving way to the strongly pickled cabbage as the flavours warmed up and mingled in the mouth. Simple – and very recognisable – ingredients, yet combined in such a way as to produce something memorable and unique.



And then, a life-changing course. “Jelly of quail, crayfish cream” sat in a cute tilted bowl next to a wooden block supporting a delicate black truffle toast. Both of these elements, it almost goes without saying, were divine, the crayfish and quail mixture simultaneously having the rich musk of deep woodland and the evocative tang of a rocky sea shore. It brought to mind childhood holidays in Spain, and of late afternoons in the countryside after a rain shower. We ate this dish, though, as the entire table disappeared under a soft blanket of bright white nitrogen, frothing and bouncing in between glassware and cutlery and spilling onto our laps. It was cleverly scented with a kind of soily, oaky, woody extract and for a few magical seconds it was like eating off the surface of a cloud. It was, quite literally, heavenly.


Next up, the famous “snail porridge”. Nowhere near as weird or challenging as its rather provocative name suggests, it was a wholesome, delicious bowl of deeply flavoured pea risotto topped with a couple of moist, perfectly seasoned snails and an aromatic topping of shaved fennel and Spanish ham. Gorgeous.


Roast foie gras with rhubarb had excellent, perfectly cooked foie and for want of a better word the most “rhubarby” rhubarb sauce I’ve ever tried. This is the kind of rather understated (albeit delicious) dish that tends to get forgotten about amidst the theatrics elsewhere but was nevertheless satisfying and impressive in its use of texture and technique.




The Mad Hatter Tea Party, of the Feasts television programme fame, was utterly magical. First of all we were presented with a bowl of intricately arranged delicacies, including a strongly-scented cauliflower and mushroom mousse and a kind of pressed ham terrine. Then a waiter arrived with a glass-topped box containing what looked like gold wristwatches, but were in fact highly concentrated beef stock covered in gold leaf. The “watches”, once dunked in hot water, dissolved into a hot beef “tea”, which you then poured into the bowl. This wasn’t just a gimmick – the concentrated stock had an amazing flavour (sweetened with Madeira too I think) and the rehydration from the concentrate enlivened the flavours and lifted the whole dish to something bordering on genius. I couldn’t stop giggling it tasted so astonishing.


“Sounds of the Sea” is a Fat Duck classic, and it’s very easy to see why. A slice of raw tuna, halibut and mackerel (each stunningly fresh, the finest sashimi I’ve ever had the pleasure to eat in their own right) were served on top of ‘sand’ made out of spiced tapioca and a shellfish foam. You eat this dish listening to a soundtrack of seagulls and crashing waves on a provided iPod. Sounds silly? Well yes, it was a bit, but I was having so much fun by this point I just kind of rolled with it. Yes, I’m eating fake sand from a glass plate whilst listening to seagulls on an iPod hidden inside a large conch shell. So?


I can see why salmon poached inside liquorice wouldn’t be everyone’s cup of tea. Of all the dishes yesterday, this was the most bizarre in terms of flavour combinations, and ironically this was the one most reminiscent of something that may have come from the kitchens at El Bulli. The salmon was, as you’d expect, perfectly cooked to just pink, and the liquorice was actually a very subtle note that was really more of a lingering aftertaste than a strong primary flavour. The artichokes cut through the fatty salmon very well, and more texture was provided in the form of tiny crunchy coriander (I think) seeds. It was very good where everything else had been mind-blowing. Hardly a criticism really.


The next two courses were actually served simultaneously (3 of us got one, 3 the other) and necessitated a spot of communal swapsies, which was a nice homely touch. Anjou pigeon was a superb bit of bird and came with a stunning black pudding and chocolate sauce. And a lovely pink lamb chop was served on a bed of some sort of clever cucumber remoulade thing – you don’t often see lamb and cucumber together outside of a middle-eastern wrap, but it made perfect sense here.



The lamb was served with what they bashfully described as “mash”. But this was no ordinary mash. This wasn’t even merely an excellent mash. This was mash of the gods, king of mash, the mash to end all mash. Light, frothy, cheesy and studded with tiny cubes of sweetbreads, it was hard to see how this could be improved upon at all, and certainly beats anything so-called mash expert Joel Robuchon ever did into a cocked hat.


The final proper main course was some godly pork belly on spelt, garnished with a couple of slices of earthily fresh black truffle. I can’t go on and on about every dish because I’m running out of superlatives, but yes it was the best pork belly I’ve ever had. What did you expect?


“Hot & Iced Tea” was a bit of clever technical wizardry matched with some rather nice tea. It looked like a normal glass of liquid, and certainly smelled like tea, but one half of it was cold and one half was hot. And I don’t mean hot below or above the cold in layers, I mean vertically down through the drink, the left hand side was cold and the right hand side was hot. Don’t ask me.



We had another mix and match dessert selection for the next round, with three of us receiving “Taffety Tart” and three a kind of rhubarb tart thing. The rhubarb was my favourite of the two, with more of that astonishing concentrated rhubarb flavour and a deliriously pretty presentation.




And after that, three of us had a “BFG” (Black Forest Gateau), as first seen in a slightly modified form on Heston’s In Search Of Perfection TV series, and three of us nitro-scrambled eggs with bacon and pain perdue. And yeah, it was all brilliant. Oh – just in case you were wondering, that cherry stalk on the BFG is edible. It’s made from dried vanilla pod. The attention to detail in this place is unbelievable.


The last course I personally ate in the restaurant was this clever whisky map, with little wine gums made from various different varieties which you peeled off in a designated order. It’s interesting just how much of the flavours of the original product survived the ‘wine gumification’ and made an extremely enjoyable end to the meal.


Or at least, nearly the end. I opted to take my final course home with me, as it came in a handy little bag marked “Sweet Shop” and contained various chocolate and confectionary items (all made in the restaurant) which I thought would be an idea to share with my flatmate. So later that evening we tried a toffee in an edible plastic wrapper which tasted of apple, a bag of coconut flavoured ‘tobacco’ infused with a real tobacco flavour, and most amazing of all what looked like a thick playing card (complete with very realistic design) but was actually a slice of white chocolate with an impossibly thin layer of raspberry jam inside. It brought giggles and gasps as I’m sure was intended.

So, the Fat Duck, the Best Restaurant In The World. Why not. Yesterday afternoon I spent four deliriously happy hours eating course after course of some of the greatest food I’ve ever tasted in my life, and almost as soon as it was over I wanted to do it all again. You can’t avoid the comparisons with the other pretender to the crown, so I won’t – El Bulli is pretentious and awkward where the Fat Duck is bold and refined; jarring and unpleasant instead of accessible and rewarding; infantile and daft rather than whimsical and playful. The £291 I spent here (£150 for the food, the £90 wine flight, a whisky and service) was worth every penny, of course, but it’s painful to recall that the last time I spent this much on a meal I left unsatisfied, unsettled and slightly queasy. I learned my lesson, and so should you – if you want to eat the food of the gods, dishes of warmth and clarity and singing of sheer (often literally) gold-plated excellence, there really is nowhere else. That twinkle in the eye of the staff I mentioned earlier, it is pride. It must be. You can hardly blame them.

10/10

Many thanks to Ben Bush for his pictures

Cheese and Biscuits Restaurant of the Year 2009 - Rules

I had hoped, in the spirit of other far more prolific gastronomes, to do a roundup of all my dining highlights of 2009 in the form of a categorised list, instead of choosing just one "Restaurant of the Year". It was partly because I didn't want to bore people with yet another gushing exaltation to Rules, but I was also curious as to whether even I could reliably recall meals and dishes from the first few months of 2009 - even El Bulli seems like a lifetime ago, never mind my first trip to the wonderful Harwood Arms in February.


But all my good intentions came to naught almost as soon as I began. Here's my draft of the first few categories:

Best restaurant overall - Rules
Best individual dish - Roast Grouse at Rules
Best bar - Brian Silva's Rules Bar

...at which point I thought "this is silly" and gave up. However although Rules does remain my favourite drinking and dining spot overall, there was some pretty fierce competition. Here, then, in no particular order, are some other things I enjoyed in 2009:


- A day trip to Whitstable and a four-hour "blind" tasting menu at the Sportsman was certainly one of the highlights of the year, and is most definitely on my "to do again" list for 2010. We were the first to arrive and the last to leave, and at no point did we get the impression they wouldn't have been happy to see us spend the night...


- Tayyabs remains as addictive and reliably enchanting as it is infuriatingly popular, but then it's when you don't see them queuing round the block in Whitechapel you have to start getting worried. The lamb chops and dry meat remain works of near-genius.


- It's still hard to resist hugging myself with self-satisfied glee at the existence of the Lavender Hill branch of Mien Tay. The friendly but slightly shambolic service and functional décor hide a skilled and generous kitchen. I've been about twenty times since October.


- Exhilarating and challenging Sichuan food in Chilli Cool, Snazz Sichuan (not reviewed) and Gourmet San, where I discovered that there is no dish that can't be improved by the addition of pig.


- A handful of equally satisfying (and stunningly good value) dim sum meals at such varied sites as New Cross, Elephant & Castle and Greenwich. Dim sum chefs train for years, the food is intricate and precise and delicately and uniquely flavoured, and it is a complete mystery why it's all so incredibly cheap. But you won't hear me complaining.


- A hugely enjoyable (and wallet-burstingly expensive) evening at the Pierre Koffman popup, in a room seemingly populated exclusively by food bloggers and journalists.


- And of course, there's that little trip to Spain in September. I didn't enjoy all of it, and in fact hated some of it, but I can't say I still don't feel privileged to have been.

So that was 2009. Many thanks once again for everyone reading the blog and following me on Twitter, and with any luck 2010 should bring even more potential delights, disasters and Ibérico ham tastings (that last wish is mainly for selfish reasons). Here's to next year - it's been a blast.

El Bulli, Costa Brava

A lot of people will tell you that Ferran Adrià, head chef at El Bulli, is a genius. For what it's worth, I think he probably is, but being a mere mortal myself it's quite a hard call to make. You see, that's the problem with genius - you almost need to be a genius yourself to recognise it in others, at least before the ideas and innovations developed by said genius become mainstream, and until they do you're more likely to be baffled or frustrated (or even worse, cursed with jealousy, Salieri-like) than, well, really actually enjoy much of it.


Consider the Beatles. Widely accepted as the greatest rock and roll band of all time, in eight short years they grew from exciting and innovative rock performers to wildly inventive studio technicians through to assured and mature crafters of clever and literate pop albums. There would be few that would argue that The Beatles (or at least Lennon and McCartney, and towards the end Harrison) were geniuses in the traditional sense - they literally invented new ways of thinking about and performing music, and their songs are stamped into the world's musical consciousness in the same way as Mozart and Beethoven. But have you listened to the White Album recently? It's one third brilliant and listenable (Blackbird, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Dear Prudence), one third challenging and experimental, but still just about accessible (Happiness Is a Warm Gun, Julia, Glass Onion) and one third bizarre, unlistenable trash (Wild Honey Pie, Why Don't We Do It In The Road?, Revolution 9). Even today it's quite hard going; God knows what they made of it in 1968. I remember my father telling me the first time he heard I'm Only Sleeping (from the album Revolver) that it was so odd with its false endings and backwards cymbals and dreamy vocals that he couldn't believe anyone could ever enjoy it. Of course now it's a seminal moment in psychedelic pop and a thoroughly good listen. When you experiment so freely, some stand the test of time and some don't. I refer you to Revolution 9.


But back to the present, and to a small restaurant at the end of a precipitous coastal road 15 minutes out of the seaside resort of Rosas in north-east Spain. It is a lovely spot, in common with much of this stretch of coastline, and the restaurant makes the most of it by serving "canapés" and "cocktails" on a very attractive terrace overlooking the bay. I use the quotation marks deliberately, because these are not canapés or cocktails as you would know them. Our "Caipirinhas" and "Mojitos" were actually short stems of sugar cane soaked in alcohol and sprinkled with salt and sugared lime peel and mint - you chew on the cane and the liquid squeezes out into your mouth very satisfyingly. It was innovative and refreshing and very enjoyable. It was also probably the most normal thing we ate or drank all evening.



I won't go into detail on all the canapés but let me take just one initial example from the selection. In the foreground of the shot above are what look like normal, fresh, juicy strawberries. And indeed they were at one time, until El Bulli saw fit to inject the inside of them with something very very salty. So what we end up with is... salty strawberries. Which tasted pretty horrible, actually. Did I just not 'get' it? Will we all be eating salty fruit in a few years time and I'll look back on the time I thought they were horrible and laugh? Is salty fruit Adrià's I'm Only Sleeping or his Revolution 9?



And so the evening wore on, and we were reseated in the restaurant proper inside. After sucking on some flower heads (which contained a lovely hibiscus 'nectar' inside), we were presented with what looked like a big block of white soap. We were instructed to 'use the paper' to eat it, which turned out to be a largely useless bit of advice as it was so fragile it almost collapsed on contact. So I buried my face into it and came back with a mouthful of what tasted mostly like coconut soap. Not actively disgusting, and you have to admire the technical skill in making such a light 'sponge', but really, this was not a pleasant thing to eat. It was bland and soapy and weird.


Far better was the next course, a miso sponge which took what was presumably the same technique and applied it to a savoury ingredient. It was rich in umami and very prettily presented. As was a slice of fried chicken skin doused in a chicken stock reduced and concentrated so much it was like eating a stock cube. But in a good way.



Truffles presented two ways didn't do much for me - great big shavings of real truffle but they were cold and one had a strange gloopy mushroomy... thing inside it which was quite off-putting. And the next course was another pretty horrible one. Chervil 'tea' - which was as far as I can tell just liquidized chervil, served in a metal bowl and looking like drained bile in a hospital kidney dish. It was unseasoned and unsettling.


Next, a little bowl of very tasty sesame-flavoured raw (I think, or at least very very lightly cooked) prawns. These were actually really nice - fun to eat and with bags of seafood flavours, but they were accompanied by a mouthful of sea anemone and caviar which didn't really taste of much. Quite an achievement for caviar.


The next course was almonds presented a number of different ways - ice cream, jelly, whole, etc. They were fine, tasted like cold almond bits. But with it was a huge lump of incredibly salty mango. Now I'm not the biggest fan of mango at the best of times, but just like the salty strawberries this was inedible - unnecessarily, pointlessly experimental for the sake of experiment.


It may seem like I'm dwelling unnecessarily on the unpleasant items and skimming over the nice bits, but this was pretty much how it went all evening. A dish or an element of a dish that tasted great and looked attractive was very often accompanied or shortly followed by something bizarre or unpleasant. Take this one for example:


Here we have four gorgeous, fresh, raw cockles with a couple of slicks of vermouth reduction and beautifully cooked crispy fennel. And there, lurking in between the seafood, are two pieces of preserved kumquat which were so unbelievably sour it was like chomping down on a raw lemon. Why?


Next, soy done a number of different ways, which we were instructed to eat from left to right. This was really interesting actually, and on the whole fairly tasty - kind of like a journey through the land of soy. I liked the crunchy beany and sprouty bits and I liked the slicks of umami-rich paste. Didn't think much of the ice cream, which was pretty bland and there was too much of it, but other than that I was happy.


The next course was very nearly successful. A gorgeous looking arrangement of rose petals was described as an 'artichoke heart', and did indeed taste a little bit like that vegetable. But it was too bitter for my liking - these were after all raw rose petals - and underwhelming all said and done.


This cute little 'apple sandwich' was a highlight. The fruit was twisted and pulled in all different directions, forming a crunchy salsa and a gloopy jus as well as the 'bread' of the sandwich itself (presumably some sort of clever freeze-drying method). It may seem a bit too clever for its own good but this one went down really well. I don't mind them messing about too much if it actually tastes any good. Fun, too.


Next was another very strong dish. We were told to dip these three little bags filled with different presentations of pine nuts into the bowl of passion fruit soup and eat it immediately. The flavours and textures here were lovely - the soft, earthy nuts and rich sweet fruit matched perfectly and it was again great fun to eat.


This shell was filled with raw chopped oysters, mushrooms and God knows what else but tasted fantastic - in fact I'd say this was probably my favourite course of them all. I wouldn't normally like anyone messing with oysters but the mushrooms added an interesting earthy extra dimension to the briny shellfish and was incredibly successful.


These huge local prawns were very cleverly presented - raw bodies but with the legs and head somehow drawn up to the top and deep-fried. You could eat the whole thing, and the crunchy legs contrasted with the squishy flesh of the body.


Parmesan Ravioli was not entirely unpleasant, just a bit pointless. The flavour combinations were, for a change, subtle and the textures pleasantly balanced - the ravioli themselves contained a creamy parmesan sauce and burst in the mouth. Nice plate, too.


The next course was one I'd been dreading - Rabbit Offals - but turned out to be almost verging on conventional. At least the bits of rabbit were all cooked - very well too, I might add - and all slipped down very well like a very meaty bruschetta. Ironically, two of my friends on the same table had at the start of the meal opted not to go down the offal route and were instead served a genuinely disgusting course of baby squids ballooned with squid ink served with a foie gras foam. They were bitter and repellent, the ink coating your mouth like thick black bile.


Fortunately, the mysteriously titled 'Hunt' was far more straightforward. Juicy, tasty and well-cooked venison in a thick jus was served alongside a few little jellied sour berries (cranberries?) covered in gold leaf. It looked and tasted delicious.


Our next course was a small glass bowl with a thin layer of ice that somehow cleverly floated inside the rim of the bowl. It was sprinkled with green tea powder and brown sugar, and you ate it by cracking off bits of the ice with your spoon. I'm also pretty sure the ice itself was flavoured with peppermint. Technically impressive, and great fun to eat.


And then, just as it seemed the meal was settling down and being consistently if not great than at least edible, a giant dinosaur egg arrived. It turned out to be coconut milk 'cooked' on the inside of a balloon using liquid nitrogen, and was certainly a sight to behold. But - much like the coconut soap at the start of the meal - it didn't really taste of anything other than unsweetened coconut ice-cream, which is not something I'd normally choose to eat. I didn't eat much of it.


This dish of freeze-dried summer berries wrapped in a sort of flavoured rice paper was really great - bursting with fruity flavours and containing a bewildering array of textures that still managed to combine well. But that was swiftly followed by:


...this supposedly 'humorous' course of cockle shells filled with fruit ice cream served with yet more inedibly sour preserved fruit.


And that, more or less, was it. We were ushered out onto the beautiful front terrace for a final time and listened to the waves crashing onto Cala Montjoi as we stuffed as many of the house chocolates down our necks as we could. It was a meal that is almost impossible to make sense of, or make any decisions about. I was fretting about writing it up from the moment, during the canapés, that it became obvious that I would not enjoy everything put in front of me that evening. Some of it was great, certainly. And the service was sparkling - all evening attentive and discreet, friendly without being matey and pitch-perfect in every regard. But it seems that now, little under a week later, it's the really nasty moments that I remember rather than the highlights. If Adrià is a genius, then perhaps this meal was his White Album, mixing in equal parts the sublime, the experimental and the downright wrong. The Beatles made that album shortly after the death of their manager Brian Epstein, and it is a body of work that exists largely due to the absence of his sensible, commercial sensibilities. If I could have taken out the dishes I hated and left in the ones I liked, perhaps I would have enjoyed the evening more. But then, that's not my decision to make. I'm not the genius.


I'll leave you with one final thought. One of our canapés at the start of the meal was the famous Spherical Olives. Sort of an olive made of olive, a delicate membrane containing a thin sauce, they burst delicately in the mouth and give forth the most incredible concentrated olive flavour. Just the right mix of technical know-how, playful innovation and command of flavour, they have become a symbol of the kind of food El Bulli is lauded for creating. But they were first served a few years ago now, and it's hard to imagine anything else we were served this visit becoming a classic in the El Bulli canon. The Spherical Olives were perhaps being served at a time when the ambitions of the kitchen and the conventions of Western cuisine met at just the right time to produce food which was not only technically stunning but also accessible and, most importantly, tasty. If the White Album marked the point where the Beatles' cohesion and self-discipline were breaking down, then perhaps the same can be true of El Bulli today. But then, perhaps this is a necessary transition. After all, the Beatles went on to make Abbey Road. Will I be back to El Bulli? It's almost a relief to say I probably won't get the chance.


5/10