The Fat Duck

Fantastic. Not a bad word to say about the Fat Duck. Food has never made me cry before but I did cry after eating one of the courses on the tasting menu. It was just divine. And don't worry if you're vegetarian - they will do a tasting menu for you too. An amazing experience and worth EVERY penny.
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Louise
Overall rating
Food 10 | Service 10 | Atmosphere 10 | Value for money 10
Thursday, December 20, 2007

Okay. We got to the restaurant about 12 and our table was booked for 1, so we had a walk around the village of Bray and stopped in for a pint in the pub opposite the Fat Duck. The Fat Duck is housed in an unassuming little cottage, white plaster, low ceilings, I counted twelve tables, I think. It's small. As you enter there is a large glass screen with swirls of white and blue and an umbrella stand made of a vast rack of test-tubes. There's no dress code, so everything's very relaxed, the waiters and waitress are dressed in black suits, shirts and ties. We were shown to our table, brought a tiny plate of olives, offered a glass of champagne from a long, low steel ice bucket and given our menus. The menus are constructed from big leather blocks, held together with leather straps that allow them to be opened both left-to-right or right-to-left, like those wooden block toys that click-clack up and down. Do you know what I mean? Anyway. We knew we wanted the tasting menu but we took a look at the carte. Believe it or not, everything looked great. We ordered. Looking around the room it appeared that everyone had come for the tasting menu. One of the nicest parts of the experience was seeing other diners enjoying different stages of the meal at different times. Diners who'd arrived before you were being presented with bits of theatre that you just glimpsed but knew you'd be enjoying soon. And you could enjoy the reactions of diners who'd arrived after you as you anticipated a flamboyant bit you knew they were about to undergo. A visit to the Fat Duck is very much about theatre.

The first thing they bring you is the Nitro-Green Tea and Lime Mousse. The waitress describes the process and the ingredients as she prepares it. First a flask of liquid nitrogen is poured into a small metal bath, then a ball of egg-white infused with lime oil, green tea and vodka is squirted onto a spoon from a pressurised container. The ball of mousse is then briefly 'poached' in the liquid nitrogen. On being removed from the bath the frigid ball of mousse is dusted with green tea powder and you are instructed to quickly pop the entire thing in your mouth and eat it in one bite. As you crunch down on it the waitress puffs lime oil from an atomiser into the air around you. The mousse sort of... explodes and then a little blob of chilled lime flavour cleanses your mouth. It's weird and fantastic and fun. I felt like a kid being shown a magic trick. I polished off my champagne and they brought us the first wine to accompany the tasting menu, a 2005 Silvaner Spatlese Trocken. Lovely. Next they brought out a little plate with two postage stamp sized slivers of jelly, one bright orange the other deep purple. The waiter tells you that one jelly is orange flavoured, the other is beetroot flavoured and to eat the orange one first. I eat the orange one, it tasted of earthy root vegetable. Then I eat the purple one and it tastes of intense orange citrus. A simple trick but one that gives you an idea of what to expect, or not to expect, for the rest of the meal.

The first dish proper is a fresh oyster served with passion fruit jelly, a tiny sheet of rock salt tuille and three little lavender flowers. The oyster is served on a small block of wood, balanced on a disc of damp salt. I pop the entire contents of the oyster shell in my mouth and am amazed at the astonishing collision of flavours. I look over at Liz (who's just eaten her oyster, too) and we both just laugh. It's the nicest thing either of us has ever eaten. I don't know how any other oyster will match this in the future. This is going to become a recurring theme. You're presented with things that seemingly have no business being on the same plate, you taste them, you decide it's the best thing you've ever tasted.

Next, we are presented with a mustard ice cream, only a teaspoonful, served in a small puddle of red cabbage gazpacho. It smells strongly of bovril, tastes nothing like bovril, tastes of grain mustard and sweet red cabbage. It tastes marvellous, of course. Weird and marvellous.

Next up is another bit of theatrical business. The waiter brings to the table a large brick of mossy earth in a wooden frame, oak moss, to be exact. He places a plate containg a sliver of toast covered in chopped truffle and radish on the table in front of each of us. To the side of the toast is a strange little tilted cup, shaped a bit like a 70s space-age chair, containing a jelly of quail, a langoustine cream and a foie gras parfait. The waiter then pours a liquid into the tray of oak moss and the entire table is engulfed in a fog that smells strongly of forest. We are invited to eat. We eat. We realise that there is a continuity of flavours and fragrances between the fog, the truffle toast, the combination of complememntary gloops in the space cup. They taste of earth, fungus, moss, all the ingredients listed above and, bizarrely, dairylea cheese triangles. Excited and a bit bewildered, we compare notes. The waiter clears the table. We've completed the hors d'oeuvres.

What other wonders does Heston's kitchen hold for us?

Watch this space...

We drain our glasses and have some water (Badoit). The next wine is served for the next dish on the menu, it's a 2006 Chateauneuf du Pape, Domaine du Beaurenard, to accompany the infamous snail porridge. We have a glug of the wine, it's delicious. The waitress brings our snail porridges.

The plates are nice here, they all have the same edges, multiple, fine, irregular grooves, like the texture of a cockleshell. In the middle of the plate is a puddle of vivid green porridge, oats still visible, with three plump snails sat on top. This is dressed with strands of Joselito ham cut as fine as filaments of saffron and fennel cut so thin as to be almost transparent. The porridge tastes of peas and grass and snail, the snails taste of snails. This dish is so delicious it's the first one I use my bread on, to mop the plate clean. I finish my wine.

The sommelier arrives with a new wine for a new course. This time it's a 2003 Vinoptima Reserve from NZ, it's to accompany roast foie gras. The foie gras is served in three little blocks, with a long broad smear of almond 'fluid gel' (like a gloopy veloute) a startlingly intense black cherry reduction and tiny dice of chamomile jelly. There's nothing particularly threatening or odd about this combination, I don't suppose there has to be, I didn't feel cheated that they hadn't added Vim or Marmite, or something. Everything complemented one another perfectly, no shock tactics just a delicious plate of food. Just when it seemed like Heston had gone all boring, the sommellier approached again with our new wine, or rather a Rashiku Junmai Ginjo sake.

"Sake?" I hear you cry. What could they be serving next?

Well, I'll tell you...

The next course is called 'Sound of the Sea' and is a bit of a mystery. It's the one dish where I momentarily thought they were taking the piss, but you surrender yourself to it and you realise it's all going to be alright. It's ludicrous and silly but I realised I was having more fun than I'd ever had in a restaurant before. It's like a trip to a restaurant combined with the theatre, the circus, the Sceince Museum and, it transpired, the seaside.

As I sipped my sake the waiter approached with two large spiky seashells for us. He placed them on the table uncoiled sets of headphones from them and invited us to put them on. We were listening to a recording of the seaside, waves breaking, pebbles shifting, gulls overhead. Then the food arrived. For plates we were given driftwood boxes filled with sand, the sand sealed under glass. On the glass was another layer of 'sand' but this was edible, it was salty and zingy, a bit like Pop Rocks without the Pop, and there was a sashimi of oysters, the whole thing was covered in a sea-foam that tasted like the sea, like oyster liquid. The overall effect was like eating... the seaside, or the seabed, or... the idea... of the sea... This food also makes sense of sake, a rice wine from a cuisine in thrall to the ocean should taste slightly of the sea. It's very difficult to write this without sounding poncy, but eating that plateful was a very moving experience. However, emotionally, things were about to get much more intense...

The waiter cleared our sake glasses and the sommelier poured us a 2001 Quinta Da Falorca Reserva. This was the wine chosen to accompany salmon poached with liquorice. This was perhaps the most beautiful plate of food I've ever clapped eyes on. A broad rectangular plate studded with grapefruit... cells (what are they called? The individual little lobes of juice that make up a grapefruit segment.) and little dots of an extremely viscous olive oil. In the bottom left corner of the plate a shiny pitch black cube. Slashed across the plate was a dense vanilla mayonnaise, pale gold riddled with tiny vanilla seeds, and a handful of tiny roasted artichoke hearts. This was just a stunningly beautiful composition. I just stared at it for ages. Well, about thirty seconds, which, for food, is a long time. When I broke open the glossy black brick I realised it contained the (perfectly cooked, just translucent) salmon. The black cocoon was a dense gel of liquorice. The taste of that first forkful was just overwhelming, I felt completely in love with the food. My eyes went all wet and I got a bit choked up... I'm absolutely serious... and I had to stop eating for a couple of minutes and have a big drink of wine. I wasn't alone, Liz was blown away, too. This was just astonishing food. It was more than food. This was like eating ideas. I grumpfled it up and licked the plate clean.

Anyway, where was I..? Oh yes, just coming up to the last savoury course. The nice sommelier man brought us a 1999 Barolo, Nei Canubi. This was a great big bugger of a wine, matched to the ballotine of Anjou pigeon. Now, I don't know how many of you have eaten or prepared pigeon recently but, I'm sure you'll agree, they can be tough little buggers. My brother-in-law shoots, so he always seems to have loads of them and I've tried cooking them lots of ways. It seems like unless you batter them flat and marinade them or braise them for hours they're like old boots. But... this pigeon... was meltingly tender, on the bone and still running with blood, it was served with pickling brine and spiced juices and a 'black pudding' that was just a massive blob of congealed blood. This plateful tasted like carnage and it was fan-fucking-tastic. I practically begged the waitress for a clue as to the bird's method of cooking but she teasingly told me to sod off.

Time for a little break. Back soon.

Right, we're edging into dessert territory and Heston's getting all playful again. After the serious business of the salmon and pigeon why not put your feet up with a nice cup of Hot and Iced Tea? Now, I have no idea how they do this but they brought us transparent cups of tea, steaming golden Earl Grey, and told us to drink them quickly. We did as we were told and got the most unusual sensation. The tea was simultaneously boiling hot and freezing cold. I don't know how they did it, but I'm glad they did.

Next they brought us each a little booklet about Agnes B. Marshall (1855-1905) The Queen of Ice Cream. We read. Agnes was something of a genius in the field of ice-cream making, she came up with the idea of supercooling ice-cream using compressed gas, one of her Victorian machines was recently discovered, put in action and made a litre of ice-cream in 3 minutes, this apparently cannot be matched by any modern machine on the market. Her books on ice-cream were bought by publishers Ward Lock who also owned the rights to Mrs Beeton's books. They focussed on Beeton and never republished Agnes' works. Then all the manuscripts were destroyed and her obscurity was assured. As we finish reading the waitress brings us each a tiny perfect Victorian ice-cream cone. Which we devour in one munch. A few moments later we are each brought a Pine Sherbet Fountain, a smaller version of the sherbert dab you can buy in the shops, a little paper tube with a twist of paper holding the 'straw' in place. In this one instead of a liquorice straw there's a hollowed out vanilla pod and the sherbet tastes of pine. It's weird and fun and tasty.

It occurs to me that I haven't had a mouthful of world-class wine in... oooh, minutes. But, look! Here comes the sommelier with a 2005 Vidal ice wine from Canada! Blimey! It's gorgeous, syrupy. honeyed and fresh. This is the wine that goes with Mango and Douglas Fir Puree, Bavarois of Lychee and Mango and Blackcurrant Sorbet. This, like it sounds, is a delicious dessert. The sorbet is particularly fine, really distinct flavour. Again this is a very pretty plateful, such beautiful vibrant colours. A bit like a Kandinsky or a Miro.

We're approaching the end, now. Sort of. And what better way to end lunch than with breakfast? The waitress brings us breakfast bowls, two little boxes (like the ones you get in a breakfast cereal variety pack) and a jug of 'milk'. We open our boxes, they contain parsnip flakes, we tip them into the bowls and cover them in parsnip milk. We eat and realise how sweet parsnips are. The cereal is crunchy, delicious and strange.

The next and last dish is another performance piece. The waiter wheels up a trolley with a copper burner (unlit) and a copper pan, a balloon whisk, a steel flask and a carton of 'eggs'. He explains that he's going to 'cook' scrambled eggs and bacon for us. He breaks one of the pre-prepared 'eggs' into the pan adds a slug of liquid nitrogen from the flask and whips the goo into Egg and Bacon Ice-Cream, this is served with pain perdu and tea jelly. The ice-cream really does taste of bacon and eggs and, predictably, it tastes fantastic. Oh, I forgot, we were served a 2005 Jurancon with this. It was bright and punchy. Terrific.

And that was the end of the meal, except... for the petit fours. We ordered espressos and the petit fours arrived, first were what looked like substantial dark chocolates, on picking them up they were actually disguised puffs of aerated milky-orange chocolate, there were also a couple of toffees wrapped in twists of cellophane, except they weren't toffees they were a sort of strange violet nougat and the cellophane was edible. Weird. Cool. The last flourish, we were brought a silver picture frame each. In the frames were maps of Scotland, describing the various whisky regions and an inset of Tennessee. On top of each region was a wine gum flavoured with the corresponding whisky. Speyside, light and bright. Highland deep and a bit salty. Islay, iodine and a bonus Jack Daniels one. Just amazing. Whisky wine gums.

That's quite a meal and it was enjoyed at a pretty leisurely pace, but with no boring interludes. The bill arrived and I looked at my watch, it was ten to five. We'd spent four hours on lunch. Definitely among the best four hours of my life. I'll do it again as soon as I have an excuse and enough money.

I want to emphasise as well that the staff here are excellent, they're really engaged with the menu and committed to ensuring you enjoy the experience. How can anyone not enjoy this food? Some of the reviewers of the Fat Duck would be better off in a Wimpy.
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Boz
Overall rating
Food 10 | Service 10 | Atmosphere 10 | Value for money 10
Wednesday, October 31, 2007

How good is this place???

I wnet with high ecpectaions and was not dissapionted!

The food was excellent and had the service to match. Although at first the combinations of food seem strange, they work. The staff were all helpfull and polite. Overall was extreamly happy with the resturant and will be returing as soon as possible.

However there was one problem, as the tables are very tightly packed i kept smashing into them because i walk with a walking stick. apart from this small factor everything was perfect.
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Simon Girvan
Overall rating
Food 9 | Service 9 | Atmosphere 7 | Value for money 8
Monday, October 22, 2007

High expectations for this restaurant and the delivery was in areas that I had not expected.

The whole concept is a fun one - the tasting menu is a playful experience of vision, auditory and taste. You don't have to like everything, just expereince the journey that the chefs take you on.

The service was more than impeccable - hard to summarise how efficient, tolerant, distantly welcoming and unintimidating this incredibly slick operation is. The couple we went with brought their 4 month old baby - who was a complete angel throughout the meal, and the restaurant could not have ben more accommodating. If one of us was not at the table when a food course was ready to serve, they noticed and held back - to ensure that the food was not ruined.

The tastes are a delight - only a few times did I wonder about the mind that had created them being slightly warped, but never underestimated the skill in their preparation - you definatetly could not make these at home!!

Value for money is not something that should be lightly assessed. Our lunch took over 4 hours, during which time we were treated with a consistent level of courtesy and service, and a steady level of delivery of a dazzling array of dishes. We had a reasonable wine at £44 - so you do not have to break the bank.

Would recommend it to anyone who can be delighted by an experience rather than expecting a slap up meal!!
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James Holmes-Siedle
Overall rating
Food 10 | Service 10 | Atmosphere 10 | Value for money 10
Friday, October 12, 2007

Its horrible, you wont like it, dont go there!

That way it wont be so hard for me to get another booking ;-)
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Overall rating
Food 10 | Service 9 | Atmosphere 10 | Value for money 8
Wednesday, October 03, 2007

I was sitting next to the couple who was disturbed by the flies.My only problem on the nigth was them.Misserable people !
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Jack
Overall rating
Food 10 | Service 10 | Atmosphere 10 | Value for money 9
Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Emperor's new clothes or what; the harsh fact is that the much of the food just does not taste very nice. I know all the creativity etc. that goes on in the kitchen but ultimately a dining experience has to be judged by what is perceptible by the customer. The whole experience is not worth the price - on a vulgar cost calculation a visit to the fat duck is not 10 times the fun of a Friday night curry, or three times the fun of a visit to the River Cafe.

The restaurant itself is decorated like a provincial gastro pub, and the service feels like a high-end version of a Disney theme restaurant. Each course of the tasting menu is accompanied by a scripted blurb which they recite like a bored Disney guide working on the Pirates Of The Carribean ride - you know the dazed look, accompanied by an enforced effort to be jolly. On one course, the waitress even narrated the script as she looked over her shoulders. If you try to engage the staff in spotaneous conversation they look panic striken as if trying to find the correct form of words in the scripted event that is dining at the Fat Duck.

Now, some bald statements - egg and bacon ice cream is not nice; neither is frozen mustard ice-cream; transforming any form of food into a jelly substance gets boring - one feels like an octagenarian astronaut indulging in a blurge of NASA engineered space food. Some of this food should be vaccum packed and sold in a souvenier shop in Cape Canavral - 'its not nice, but you can eat it with no teeth, and take it into space. How clever is that'.
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Mark
Overall rating
Food 8 | Service 7 | Atmosphere 8 | Value for money 7
Friday, September 14, 2007

We booked ourselves into the Fat Duck to celebrate our 1 year anniversary and were very excited about the evening. We were pleasantly surprised by how welcoming it was - it didn't feel stuffy like some high end restaurants. The wait staff were friendly and entertaining, the food interesting and the evening all going rather well - certainly a fun experience.

Then it all went downhill and fast. First the wine was corked, a problem the waiter was quick to fix and for which he was very apologetic. But then we noticed a swarm of small flying insects in the corner above our table. They had obviously just hatched as there were lots of babies, some of whom chose to fly down to our table at various intervals throughout the night.

On bringing this to our waiters attention he was again apologetic and got the manager. I can safely say I have never seen a situation 'managed' as badly. He spent ten minutes telling us that it was a result of being near the river and that as he hadn't placed them there himself, he could offer little help. Finally he offered to move us to another table when the diners had finished their desserts.

We were then left to our main meals, without being check on or moved by the manager. Finally he returned to tell me (when my partner had gone to the toilet) that he wasn't going to be able to move us and there was nothing he could do. He seemed to take some pleasure in this fact. Not once did he offer us a complementary drink or suggest he could compensate us for the situation. We asked to be moved again, but to no avail. It was certainly far from the perfect experience you would expect for a £250 per head meal. Finally the bill arrived, for the full £500 + amount. The manager refused to budge on the amount, finally offering us a glass of champagne to compensate. We refused to pay and after 15 minutes of arguing had the wine deducted from the bill.

I will not be returning and I would certainly not recommend anyone else venture to the Fat Duck. It is a shame as the food was lovely, although I don't think i'd consider it worth the money even without the manager fiasco.
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Emily
Overall rating
Food 8 | Service 2 | Atmosphere 2 | Value for money 1
Thursday, August 30, 2007

The hype was true.

We had a tasting menu and it was all magic.

From the simplest bread and butter to the most elabotate appetisers - it was a truly fantastic experience.

The only downsides were that the wines were not as good as hoped & it was quite difficult to understand the waitress.
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contessa - View all reviews by this user
Overall rating
Food 9 | Service 8 | Atmosphere 8 | Value for money 7
Friday, August 24, 2007

We ate at the Fat Duck on Saturday. I was a bit apprehensive as I'm usually a traditionalist with my food (I'm French) - but the food was gorgeous. Good service, although it's a shame some waiters are in your way when you go up to the toilet (they have a "workstation" right at the bottom of the stairs).

However, I do think that the prices are far too high - I know what you're thinking: as long as people, including myself, are prepared to pay for it... But this restaurant really is RIDICULOUSLY expensive - £370 for 2 à la carte... I've had just as nice meals for half that price in London.
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Overall rating
Food 8 | Service 7 | Atmosphere 6 | Value for money 2
Tuesday, August 14, 2007