Not far from London, in the village of Bray, there is The Fat Duck restaurant, which in 2005 was recognized as the best restaurant in the world according to Restaurant magazine ratings.
The English countryside, a modest building, an unremarkable interior and... a table booked three to four weeks in advance. This is truly amazing. What is the restaurant known for, and why is it so popular among not only local residents, but also guests?
This is a relatively young establishment. The Fat Duck was founded in 1995. And almost immediately he gained fame among the population. His specialty is the so-called “molecular gastronomy,” although the chef prefers not to use this term, which is not understood by everyone, and therefore intimidating. First of all, The Fat Duck is famous for its unusual, extravagant dishes. It's not every day you can taste sardine sorbet, snail porridge or crab bisque. Heston Blumenthal, the restaurant's chef, experiments with dishes based on chemical processes and complex formulas. In 2005, several episodes of the program “Kitchen Chemistry with Heston Blumenthal” were even filmed and shown on Discovery. The main idea of restaurant cuisine is the combination of what is usually separated. It is unlikely that you will be served caviar with white chocolate or ice cream with bacon anywhere else.
Waiters also like to surprise visitors with the help of visual deception. So, for example, when serving orange and red jelly, it is recommended to first try beet jelly, and then orange. The visitor, putting a red slice into his mouth, realizes that this particular jelly is orange, and the orange one is beetroot.
One of the most popular dishes in the restaurant is skinless pigeon with pistachio sauce. A special cooking method allows the use of ingredients - pigeon meat and pistachios - whose tastes are considered incompatible in cooking. The secret lies in the panazzetta - Italian bacon - in which the pigeon is wrapped during cooking. Thus, “connecting threads” appear between two products that are incompatible by definition.
A true gourmet simply must visit The Fat Duck at least once in his life to personally appreciate the uniqueness of the dishes and flavor combinations.
Restaurant The Fat Duck - PHOTO
Maria Ivanova
PR Manager of "Fat Duck"
We are a truly honest single-product restaurant. Our menu contains duck dishes from all over the world. It includes traditional Chinese Peking duck, Italian bruschetta, duck stew with a French motif, and rich soup with meatballs in the Russian style.
We’ll also make a decoy if you order a whole roasted duck!
Interior
The spacious hall with 50 seats is decorated according to the sketches of Moscow architects in the best traditions of family European restaurants. Brickwork, an abundance of wood trim, restrained pastel colors, upholstered furniture, delicate lighting and a little vegetation - everything is extremely laconic, unobtrusive and pleasant. At the same time, there is something to catch the eye: funny portraits of aristocratic cats hang on the walls, and charming handmade knitted ducks are placed throughout the restaurant.
Menu
The menu includes dishes of European, Asian and Russian cuisine, prepared from duck. An absolute hit is, of course, Peking duck. Here it is prepared as authentically as possible according to a traditional Chinese recipe.
Some truly unusual offerings include duck crème brûlée as an appetizer or a real spring roll with poultry.
And also, if you can’t stand duck for unknown reasons and still come to the restaurant, they will be able to offer him several fish, vegetable or meat dishes. The same steaks, for example.
November 25, 2008 I had the opportunity to visit a world famous British restaurant « Fat Duck", which translated from English sounds like "Fat Duck". The restaurant is located in the town of Bray, a seven-minute drive from Windsor. The owner of the restaurant and its chef is the unsurpassed culinary alchemist Heston Blumenthal. Next to the restaurant is the Heston Blumenthal Taste Laboratory. From this laboratory, the chef broadcasts the recipes of his cuisine to the whole world, and also talks about the “alchemy” of certain culinary products.
At the restaurant I ordered a test menu consisting of 20 dishes. All this pleasure cost me about 140 British pounds, including wine and excellent Chinese oolong. The spectacle turned out to be unforgettable, and the whole action most likely resembled a show. I haven’t felt such emotions and pleasure from everything that happened for a long time. Sitting next to me were footballers from Chelsea, representatives of English show business and simply culinary gourmets, probably Michelin “scouts”.
The restaurant seats about 37 people. In appearance it resembles a Victorian-era house, nothing superfluous and everything as functional and rational as possible. Reservations must be made in advance. I reserved my place 2 months in advance.
At the end of the “meal”, as a token of gratitude for the culinary fairy tale, I gave Mr. Blumenthal an original doll, which I bought the day before in one of the shops on Arbat. In response, the chef presented me with his new autographed book.
For my readers, I want to tell you a little about Mr. Blumenthal, about his “Fat Duck” and about culinary “alchemy”. In the Clinaria section I will post several recipes from chef Heston Blumenthal.”
The parents of Englishman Heston Blumenthal could not have imagined in their wildest dreams that their son would make money from snail oatmeal. He shouldn’t have become a cook at all, but he did. Moreover, one of the most learned chefs in the world.
If not for one trip to France, Heston would have been a normal bank clerk. But when he turned sixteen, his parents took him to Provence, and there they somehow booked a table in a two-star Michelin restaurant. Lobster sauce pouring over the soufflé, a leg of lamb with aromatic herbs... An elderly sommelier with a pomaded mustache... Heston was shocked. He decided that from that day on, this was his life too.
Now, if Blumenthal is told that English cuisine is the worst in the world (after Finnish, as French ex-President Chirac noted), he is not offended, because he understands where this idea comes from. When he was a child in the 70s, she really was terrible. In Britain at that time it was almost impossible to buy good olive oil - you had to go to the pharmacy to buy a bottle of Italian exrta virgine! The British bought bread for the whole week at once.
It was customary to bake meat only for Sunday lunch, otherwise it would take a long and tedious time to cook. In stores, besides spaghetti, there were no other types of pasta... In just ten years, the situation has changed so much that now it’s even hard to believe. And on this new British “scene” Blumenthal’s “Fat Duck” was able to appear, recognized in 2005 as the best restaurant in the world and awarded three stars by the Michelin Guide.
For the last five years, Heston has been occupied with one main question: how does the brain interpret the signals sent to it by different senses? Why does one person adore the same food and another hates it? Why is the unchanged taste of a product often perceived differently by the same person? His favorite example of how much atmosphere can affect taste is this. You come to France, travel through the castles of the Loire, and there, in the sun, on the river bank, you dine in a small restaurant with oysters, washed down with white Muscadet wine. And this is the best muscadet you've ever tasted! You buy a box right away, come back, invite friends to your cramped apartment, pour out the wine... and it’s disgusting! But it’s not about the wine at all - it was the same in the Loire Valley. You just didn’t bring the freshest oysters, sunshine and splashing waves with you...
In his restaurant, Heston tries to create a special atmosphere. If his customers order the “Sounds of the Sea” seafood dish, they will be served an iPod with the sounds of seagulls and splashing waves playing in their headphones. The dish itself looks like a box with a glass top, inside of which you can see sand with shells. It's not really sand at all, but a mixture of tapioca and fried bread crumbs ground with fried baby eels, flavored with cod liver oil and langoustine; with abalone, mussels, shrimp, oysters and three types of algae.
Dessert will be followed by coffee and a silver rosebush with edible petals flavored with apples, lychees, coriander and raspberries; and as a digestif - chewing gum with the taste of 18-year-old whiskey. Compared to such a menu, Blumenthal's famous snail porridge (snail porridge) looks somewhat boring and outdated.
Blumenthal is a born researcher. He, for example, would not mind buying a time machine - his interest in old British cuisine is so great. Two of his friends, historians studying the kitchen of Hampton Court Palace (once the residence of English monarchs) (by the way, I was also in this palace, albeit in the summer, and someday I’ll tell you about it and the “Tudor kitchen”), showed Blumenthal letters and recipe books , from which he made an unambiguous conclusion: in the 18th century, Britain was one of the dominant powers not only at sea, but also in the kitchen.
The cooks then tried to cook everything they could get their hands on. Some recipes were extreme - say, a pheasant dish: the bird was “skinned”, the carcass was fried, and the skin and feathers were then put back on, using a mechanical device to set the bird in motion right on the table. The recipe, which Blumenthal likes much less, tells how to roast a goose alive... No, he does not have the slightest desire to repeat this process - but he would look at how the cooks were “creative” at that time.
One can only guess how creative Heston Blumenthal himself is. He says he can be inspired by anything, from a new product to bad weather. Let's say he came up with a drink of hot chocolate and red wine when he got caught in the rain and was damn cold.
If you book a table at Fat Duck online, you will immediately be taken to a website that is a candy store - a small but very rich interactive world. You wander between the shelves, choose “sweets” - and they tell you about the menu and the philosophy of the restaurant. After dinner, on the way out, you will receive a bag of sweets that you “clicked on” during the online review process - quite real. Excellent apple pie flavored candy.
(The information is published based on materials obtained from various Internet sources).
Such gastronomic masterpieces as “Edible Snow”, wine candies “Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh”, “Christmas Tree” are not only original and tasty, but also meet the highest quality requirements. However, the composition and technology of their preparation are kept secret. For example, a New Year's dinner, which includes these unusual dishes, costs about $480.
This restaurant is located in the county of Berkshire in the village of Bray, not far from Windsor Castle, the residence of the English kings. Despite the distance from London, its regular visitors are true connoisseurs of fine dining - the most famous aristocratic families of England and the richest businessmen.
The Fat Duck restaurant is known for its culinary experiments, as its dishes are prepared in a “molecular kitchen”, more like a scientific laboratory.
A fair statement from one of the physicists:
“The trouble with our civilization is that we are able to measure the temperature of the atmosphere of Venus, but we have no idea what is going on inside the soufflé on our table.”
Therefore, they experiment with taste here, based on the most complex chemical formulas and processes occurring in food during cooking. And the experiments meet the expectations of visitors. Each dish is a culinary masterpiece.
Such unusual, extravagant dishes as snail porridge, crab cake, sardine sherbet, partridge jelly, cucumber, fish, bacon and egg ice cream will pleasantly surprise you.
By the way, in the 19th century, during the era of Queen Victoria, ice cream was prepared with a spicy taste. For example, cucumber ice cream served with thinly sliced fresh cucumbers, Parmesan or crab ice cream were served at the end of the meal.
But there were dark days at this restaurant, after the mass poisoning of customers in 2009. Then 529 people were poisoned by spoiled oysters. The owner explained this by malfunctions of the cooling system and some deviations from hygiene rules by the staff. The establishment had to be closed for 3 weeks. But after the opening, the English restaurant “Fat Duck” again began to delight its visitors with high-quality and original dishes, which it has been doing with great success for more than 60 years.
On a note: The Fat Duck restaurant is open all days except Sunday and Monday. A table should be reserved 2-3 months before your visit.
Gourmet paradise opens its gates. Are you ready to discover the taste of oatmeal with snails, caviar with white chocolate, veal's head soup and smoked bacon, combined with sweet ice cream? No, no, you don’t need to be scared and think about the prospects of poisoning. This is not herring with milk.
Every dish, no matter how incredible it may seem, is prepared in accordance with the principles of molecular gastronomy. The owner of the Fat Duck restaurant, Heston Blumenthal, is an ardent supporter of this style of cooking. The scientific revolution has reached the kitchens. The most modern chefs now pay attention to the physical and chemical processes that occur in food during cooking. As one of the founding physicists said: “The trouble with our civilization is that we are able to measure the temperature of the atmosphere of Venus, but we have no idea what is going on inside the soufflé on our table.” It’s a fair saying, I also can’t imagine what processes are going on inside dumplings or a can of canned food, but I know for sure that you won’t be satisfied with the atmosphere of Venus.
But enough science, because this is not a lecture at a culinary college, but an essay about a famous restaurant. Fat Duck or The Fat Duck is one of the best restaurants in the world. I had hoped to visit it during my current trip to England, but it didn’t work out. Fat Duck belongs to that category of catering establishments where you have to reserve a table several months before your visit. In this regard, absolutely everyone is equal, that is, those people who can afford to dine on local dishes. Although, to be fair, I note that the prices at Fat Duck are impressive, but a middle-class Briton can easily afford to spend an evening here with his beloved.
The Fat Duck has been awarded three Michelin stars, I'm not a great expert, but this level indicates the fact that Bershire is worth a visit if only to visit this restaurant. It is just as important for a gourmet to visit it as it is for a tourist coming to the UK for the first time to visit the Tower.
This time I failed to hit the Fat Duck. Two months of waiting for a table. Oh, in two months I will be able to find myself in Great Britain only if I am kidnapped by Her Majesty’s secret services, or if my non-existent billionaire uncle passes into another world in one of the Scottish castles. But I visited the Fat Duck several years ago, after the infamous poisoning of five dozen patrons at once. This event occurred in 2009, and was a serious blow to the reputation of the institution. It was closed briefly to understand the reasons. In the end, it was all blamed on stale shellfish and a faulty cooling system. Although I wouldn’t be surprised if the real reason turned out to be experiments in the field of molecular gastronomy - some kind of swallow’s nests in gravy, stuffed with fertilized sea cucumbers in gravy made from silkworm caterpillar pupae.
The Fat Duck restaurant even has its own laboratory, where alchemist chefs invent immortality pills and the most incredible dishes. Experiments pay off. Unlike most expensive restaurants, when you go to Fat Duck, you know for sure that you will get something tasty, unusual and beautiful for your money. Each dish is a masterpiece, an edible equivalent of the Mona Lisa. It doesn't hurt to pay £100 for a dish that you can only try in one place in the world.
By the way, that time I ended up in Fat Duck only because the restaurant had just opened after the sad incident with shellfish and the former excitement was temporarily absent. But now the situation has already leveled off.
Overall, if you are a foodie, then you definitely need to visit the Fat Duck, if you are not a foodie, then you should still visit the Fat Duck, as it is worth it. Please note - the restaurant is closed on Sundays and Mondays and tables must be booked in advance. So I forgot to do this and remained hungry. But it’s okay, hunger can also be useful.
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