Warming Up

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Tuesday 2nd May 2006

I went for lunch with a friend at the ultra posh restaurant The Fat Duck in Bray. (Michelin restaurant of the year 2001). I don’t often go to posh restaurants and even more rarely for lunch (unless some TV executive is paying), but I have heard great things about this place and I really wanted to try it out and see if it was a s good as they said. Having been a very fussy eater as a child and then a vegetarian for 15 years, I am now prepared to eat anything that isn’t poisonous, which is a good thing as Heston Blumenthal the twisted Willy Wonka genius behind this place is famous for making concoctions of the most unlikely ingredients to create incredible taste sensations. You have to book ahead weeks in advance to get into this place. He is clearly doing something right, unless of course it’s an amazing case of the emperor’s new snail porridge and he is tricking or mocking the high falluting rich people of the country.
We plumped for the tasting menu which costs an oddly specific sum of £97.75. It’s the most I have ever spent on lunch, but as shameful as spending such an amount may be when people in the world are starving it seems excellent value to me as you get about fifteen things to eat, which are all admittedly quite small, but have had a lot of preparation and love and humour put into them. Turning into my dad I found myself worrying about the person who has to do all the washing up for this fifteen course meal. I hope they pay them well. Everything was well washed.
The tone was set by the first morsel, which was Nitro-green tea and lime mousse. The waiter brings a steaming bowl of freezing liquid nitrogen (or something, I am only guessing from the name) to your table, squirts some white stuff out of a little silver aerosol thing, puts it in the steaming bowl. It is literally like something out of Star Trek or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and this experience could only be heightened by having the stuff served by someone with a crinkly forehead or an Oompah Loompah, though this might raise the price eve higher. The blob goes crispy and then is handed to you for your immediate consumption. It is cold, which surprises you if you’re not paying attention to the description from the slightly incoherent non-Oompah Loompah French waiter and then cracks on your tongue and a refreshing melting sensation and taste spreads through your mouth. What fun! Don’t think of the starving people in Africa.
So it goes on, as you can see from the menu which I have helpfully attached for you. As an ex vegetarian I feel very guilty and evil for eating the first dish with foie gras in it, but it is one of the most delicious things I have ever tasted, which doesn’t assuage my guilt any, but at least makes my tongue happy. The roast foie gras though is pretty horrible and makes me feel a bit sick on every level and is the revenge of the ducks. If it is any consolation to the ducks, by now I am already feeling stuffed and am sure my liver is turning into pate as well. Don’t think about the ducks or the starving people in Africa.
I have never eaten snails before, so what better way to consume them than in a green porridge. It’s very good. But I don’t really enjoy the salmon poached with liquorice and it’s at this point I begin to see that this could all be an elaborate piss take. Because you’re in a fancy and special restaurant you have no compunction in eating whatever is placed in front of you. Because it is described by a suave waiter you think it must be OK and I am pretty sure if they gave you bat faeces mixed with dried slug vomit that you’d gobble it down and pull an impressed and sophisticated face afterwards. I would quite like it if at the start of the meal they told you that one of the things on the menu was a joke item and would be inedible and that you had to be clever enough to guess which one it was, because then I think people would be eyeing every course and thinking, “No, come on, this isn’t real food.”
Most of it is truly excellent and I kind of wish all food came in such small portions, because it means you concentrate on all the tastes and that’s what this place is really all about. And what other restaurant gives you a sherbet fountain or a tiny ice cream cornet that makes you feel like a giant? Who else would think of making smoked bacon and egg ice cream, or have the humour to give you a tiny box of parsnip cereal with milk beforehand so that you have the full experience of breakfast at the end of your meal. Some Americans opposite us were unimpressed by the bacon and egg ice cream, and didn’t eat more than a mouthful, but mixed with the other stuff on the plate it was really, really brilliant. The last item is “Hot and Cold Tea”. I presumed that this was a choice and made a joke about Blumenthal somehow creating a beverage that was simultaneously hot and cold. But Blumenthal trumped my joke by proving his Willy Wonka credentials and doing exactly that. To find out how you will have to go. I know it sounds like a lot of money but you’re in there for about three hours and it’s worth saving up for a special occasion.
After that I drove bloated and tired and coming down with another bout of lurgy to Bristol to try out my new material. It went just OK and the audience seemed a little shocked by some of the more contentious things and my attempts to joke about how sad and empty my life were seemed to elicit more sympathy than laughter (it’s meant to be ambiguous but not sure if I crossed a line tonight). Maybe the audience could smell the foie gras on my breath and realised how much I had changed.
Afterwards in the bar a drunken Bristol couple sat next to me in the middle of an argument. The woman was upset that her boyfriend seemed to be spending a lot of nights away from her. The man was a terrible liar and in my sobriety I could see through him, but the girl so wanted to believe him. The man stuttered and claimed he was spending nights with his granny who was ill with flu. “Do you swear on your granny’s life that you’re spending the night at your granny’s?” the suspicious girl asked (though the way he had made the claim should have proven to her that he wasn’t)
“I swear on my granny’s life that I am spending the night at my granny’s house,” he lied.
“Right, well I believe you then,” his easily duped girlfriend declared, “But you’re spending too many nights at your granny’s”
“Well I really like my gran,” the lothario shot back, then realising in his drunkenness he had made an error, after a second’s pause he added “ny”.
The conversation continued and my favourite exchange was when the Bristolian man said “She’s a real hypochondriac, not one of those fake hypochondriacs”, which was nice to know. It’s better that someone genuinely believes that they are ill when they aren’t., rather than pretending to believe they are ill when they are well. I hate those fake hypochondriacs too. If someone isn’t really ill then I want them to believe that they are really ill, not to know all along that they’re not really ill, but still pretend that they are. I love Bristol. But no “Deal or No Deal” parties tonight, so it was a long drive home and bed at 4am (after winding down by finishing the excellent book “Arthur and George” by Julian Barnes – read it and that is an order). It was thus a delight to be woken up at 11 by a motorbike courier, answering the door to him in my dressing gown, to be told “I wish I could stay in bed til 11am. Maybe I am in the wrong job.” I wanted to shout at him, “Well maybe if you worked until midnight and then had to drive home for two or so hours and then needed to wind down you would be able to.” But I didn’t. After all I had only actually worked for an hour yesterday and eaten a lunch that cost me over a hundred pounds (including drinks) so maybe he had a point. It’s not a bad life. Even if I am a bit ill. And if I am not ill, then at least I am a real hypochondriac.