The Fat Duck Experience

We finally made it to the Fat Duck restaurant. After spending many years watching Heston Blumenthal’s shows on TV and having him pop up on Master Chef on a regular basis, we finally got to taste and experience it for real. And it did not disappoint.

 

For those of you who aren’t interested in food porn, you can scroll down to the bottom of the post to see our photos from northern England.

For everyone else, let the food porn begin!

 

The first thing they do when you arrive is to give you a menu. But it’s not like a normal restaurant menu, instead it’s a map where you follow an itinerary around the theme of a childhood holiday.

The first section of the holiday is a trip to the beach. But of course the most important meal of the day is breakfast, and you can’t skip that, so you need to choose your cereal from a variety pack.

I picked the healthy option!

When I saw what was written on the back of the box of the healthy option I felt a bit sorry for it being unloved so I had to pick it. All the boxes have funny stuff like this written on them so I spent a bit of time going through and reading all of them while Pedr was busy following the waitress’s instructions. Turns out it was a race to pick a box, open it and put together the prize inside, which was a wooden box. Since Pedr finished long before I’d even started he won a coin.

Once we’d built our boxes it was time to have some milk and cereal. Well, not quite. When you mix it all together it becomes a full English breakfast with eggs, tomatoes, bacon and toast flavours.

After breakfast it was time to go to the beach.

The Sound of the Sea is probably one of the dishes Heston is best known for. When it’s served you get a seashell with headphones which play beach sounds like waves gently lapping the shore, seagulls and the occasional boat. The dish itself has fish, octopus, seaweed and seawater flavours, as well as crunchy ‘sand’ and ‘seafoam’ and when you eat all the elements together it really does taste like you’re eating the sea.

When I was eating it and listening to the sounds it brought back all my childhood memories of when my dad would take me and my brother down to Shelly Beach in the summer and we would swim in the water, climb along the rocks, throw seaweed at each other and build sandcastles. For me, this was the dish that perfectly captured what Heston was going for with this menu.

After the Sound of the Sea it was time for some ice blocks. Once again, looks can’t be trusted at the Fat Duck and these ‘ice blocks’ were actually a Waldorf salad and a salmon, avocado & horseradish twister. By now I’d learnt that looks can be deceiving and was considering eating the sand and rocks that came with the ice blocks. Luckily for me, the table next to us tried it first and was told by the waitress that the rocks weren’t actually edible.

After a trip to the beach it was time to go exploring in the forest. There’s a miniature forest in a glass case that they bring to the table and pour some liquid nitrogen into it and all the smells of the forest come out of it. A bit later all the liquid nitrogen comes up through the forest as mist which then pours all over the table.

This dish was mushroom and truffle based with a nice earthy flavour, and with big thick slices of Australian truffles through it. I didn’t realise that Aussie truffles were to highly prized. As a measure of how good this dish was, Pedr ate the whole thing up. Pedr absolutely HATES all kinds of mushrooms.

Next up was the mock turtle soup which was inspired by Alice in Wonderland. In one section of the book the March Hare, who is waiting for the Mock Turtle, dips his pocket-watch into his tea, and that’s what you do here. We were given gold pocket-watch teabags to put in our teapots which then dissolved and became the broth for the soup. Then you pour the ‘tea’ into the cups with the solid ingredients and voila! you have mock turtle soup.

The next section of the holiday was a trip to a restaurant for a 3 course dinner. So you have a meal within a meal. It’s actually quite clever how they’ve done this as it means they can still have a changing menu but still keep their signature dishes like Sound of the Sea.

The dishes in this section of the menu are more ‘normal’ looking than the rest. I was confused by this at first, so when the waitress served us bread and butter I asked her what it really was and didn’t really believe her when she said it was just bread and butter.

This is without a doubt the best lamb either of us has ever tried. So perfectly tender, juicy and full of flavour. It pretty much just melts in your mouth.

The dessert was a fantastic idea that really worked well. It’s dessert wine, turned into a dessert. Each bauble is a different flavour you get in dessert wine. So you get apricot, citrus, honey and even fizzy flavours which you can try individually or mix a few together to make your own dessert wine. This was my favourite of the dessert dishes.

To finish up the meal-within-a-meal we had whisky gums which are whisky flavoured gummy lollies. Each one is made from a different whisky and you just peel off the gummy lollies from the map and pop them into your mouth. It was a nice playful way to end our ‘restaurant meal’.

After dinner it was time to get ready for bed, which meant a dessert of creamy soothing, gentle & comforting flavours like vanilla, meringue, milk & orange blossoms to send off to sleep. There was even food served on a levitating pillow.

The magnets holding up the pillow are pretty strong, it had no trouble holding up the heavy magnifying glass that I put on it. I thought about adding a glass of water on top, but thought that could end badly and that I shouldn’t go around breaking things in very expensive restaurants.

Finally it was dream time in a lolly shop. This is where Pedr’s coin was finally spent. You put the coin in a miniature model of a lolly shop which starts the mechanism for the lolly dispensing machine. Luckily I got a lolly bag too, even though I didn’t have a coin.

The lollies are small chocolates and caramels which you can take home if you’re too full from the rest of the meal. I say that those people just aren’t dedicated enough.

After nearly 5 hours of eating we finally finished our surreal and delicious experience at the Fat Duck. Definitely loved the whole experience, we thought that we might be sitting in awkward silence for sections of the meal because we’ve spent every waking minute of the last 7 months together (so new conversation material is hard to find). But surprisingly we spent the whole time talking and laughing and not feeling like any of it was forced or awkward. It was just an absolutely fantastic experience. It really shows the power of a great meal and creative genius like Heston.

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And now for some photos of things that aren’t food.

The model’s pretty big: 3.8m long, 1.5m wide and 1.7m tall. And it’s not hollow either, the inside is complete just like the outside with columns, tombs and furniture.