111 Hammersmith Road, London W6
(020-8741 1177)To celebrate my best friend’s 36th birthday last week I booked a table for five at The Fat Duck. Then it occurred to me that it might be nice if I invited him along, too, so I made it six. I chose The Fat Duck because it was with Matt (the friend in question) that I went to El Bulli in Gerona for the giggly
suicide-pact-cum-virginity-loss-meets-brain-surgery-over-canapés experience that I wrote about here a couple of years ago, and I thought he’d appreciate a visit to its nearest English equivalent. And also because, as media correspondent for The Daily Telegraph, he doesn’t get many laughs.
As a Bulli initiate, Matt was unfazed by the colour/taste reversal trick in the beetroot and orange lozenges, took the meringue poached at the table in liquid nitrogen in his stride, and merely acknowledged that the caviar on a white chocolate wafer worked rather well. We got him, however, with the briefcase.
For, rather than providing a cake for the special occasion, Heston Blumenthal sent his maître d’ over with a hinged leather box. Cigars? Come on. What do you think this is, the 20th century? What was inside the case was six pairs of Sennheiser
headphones and a radio mike. Oh, and a plate of Blumenthal’s famous Space Dust chocolate truffles.
I had read about this. Heston wants to reawaken what he calls the “forgotten sense” in the eating experience. We use crunch noises, for example, to trigger the reflex that stops our teeth smashing together when we bite, but not when we chew. So if he can persuade us we are crunching when we eat a ripe banana - by altering the noise we hear in our headphones in “real time” - then he can theoretically stop our teeth from meeting, and thus from chewing the banana. Equally, to hear in your head the sound of the person next to you chewing a sweet, when you yourself are not chewing one, should cause a Pavlovian drool reaction, or possibly a punch in the nose.
The Fat Duck has not yet officially introduced the headsets to its menu, so I would be the first restaurant critic to give them a go. At a word from the waiter, we put on our “cans”: six phat DJs at a very quiet free-styling session in a converted pub in Berkshire. Or, rather, six civilian observers “embedded” in the front line of the war on gastronomic tedium. Or, if I’m honest, six middle-class goons with Mickey Mouse headsets, pissed off their faces at two o’clock on a Thursday morning somewhere off junction nine of the M4, who should have been in bed hours before.
Matt took the mike, and a chocolate. The thing about the Space Dust truffles is that they go off like billy-o in your mouth anyway, and with the mike at his lips, and the echo-effect and volume turned up full, it was like the sound of a giant troll finishing off the last bits of crunchy toe and elbow from the princess he had for breakfast, in a vast underground cavern containing a black lagoon. We laughed until our heads fell off.
Funnily enough, while The Daily Telegraph’s media correspondent loved The Fat Duck, its restaurant critic, who visited in January, did not. But then we are talking about a newspaper that abhors innovation in art and architecture, social organisation, sexual and racial politics, sport, dress, manners… why on earth would its restaurant critic applaud anything but bacon and eggs and treacle pud? Mistaking Blumenthal’s playfulness for boredom (a mistake one might easily make with Joyce, Picasso or Stravinsky), she wrote last year: “I find myself desperate for a proper lunch - a
perfect roast chicken, a crisp green salad and a glass or two of fine white burgundy. A cheese sandwich!”
Talk about reactionary - it reminds me of Prince Charles prattling on about architecture. A cheese sandwich or a bit of chicken is lovely, yes, and traditional and honest and beautiful and just the sort of thing that made Britain great before all these foreign johnnies came along with their so-called “progress” and their scary post-modern constructions. But nobody is saying you have to go to The Fat Duck every day. It is not a threat to cheese sandwiches
Still, if you really do fear this pinko lunacy (Blumenthal, like Trotsky, wears glasses and has a funny-sounding name) and believe that any encouragement of it will lead to a frothing mob of “molecular gastronomists” tearing down our great old restaurants to put up their flimsy Portakabins of foie gras and spun sugar, then you’d best go to Chez Kristof.
I am keeping my words on Chez Kristof to a minimum because, despite the fact that it has been rave-reviewed and is rammed every night, on the two occasions I have been there I have not been fed
especially well.
It is on the site of what was previously a restaurant called Maquis on Hammersmith Grove, and is not much changed visually, except that it has people in it. Thousands of them. The buzz is brilliant. If buzzes are your thing (my uncle, for example, has 24 different tunes on his doorbell) you’ll love it. And the maître d’is the estimable Walter Lecocq, late of Richard Corrigan’s Lindsay House, who is not only enjoying working in his shirt-sleeves for a change, but gets a hell of a lot out of a young staff that is short on both experience and phlegm (crucial, crucial qualities if you are working in any new restaurant du moment).
The menu made my heart sing: pissaladière, bagna cauda, soupe de poisson, clam and bean stew, rillette de porc, fromage de tête, salade de gésiers (to name but half of the starters); and then cod grand aïoli, ox cheek daube, coquelet with vinegar and shallots, côte de boeuf béarnaise for two, tripes à la tomate and loads more besides, changing daily, even twice daily. Thereafter, a bit of a let-down.
The food comes in cast-iron pans in which it has apparently been cooked - a sort of upscale, Francophone balti. But if the food was cooked in these pots why were none of them terribly hot? Some very good sweetbreads with wild mushrooms were served at little more than body temperature - slightly queasifying.
And then, alas, the pissaladière was on plasticky pastry and all but free of anchovies, the salade de gésiers was greasy, the pig’s head was fine but uninteresting with a good, tangy gribiche. The pigeon and lentils was dahl-like and drab and my cassoulet was, like Parky interviewing Sophia Loren, too greasy to stomach. There was a good, huge crab with mayonnaise and the chips were twice-cooked and quite delicious.
When I went back the following week for lunch the waitress warned me off the sauté of veal kidneys, saying they were “served whole, very tough and bloody”. So I ordered red mullet. It came, my friends, ungutted. A first for me. I went to cut the top fillet from the glistening red fish and its poo flooded out on to my plate. Its little brown heart and kidneys and other mushed up dangly bits were all still attached to the spine. A terrible thing to witness.
The waitress was horrified and brought me a very nice steak instead. And so, rather like when I reviewed the Wolseley, I find myself saying that Chez Kristof is lovely in every way as long as you stick to the crab mayonnaise and the steak and chips. Of course, if you’re a Telegraph reader you’ll probably be doing that anyway.
Maître d’: 9
Buzz: 8
Food: 3
Score: 6.67
Price: £30 per head sans grog. But the all-French wine-list is both excellent and reasonably priced.
The Fat Duck
High Street, Bray, Berkshire (01628 580333)
Go on: if you haven’t done it, do it. And if you don’t like it, don’t do it again.
Ottolenghi
287 Upper Street, London N1 (020-7288 1454)
Supper served in the cast-iron pot in which it was cooked, but steaming hot and full of flavour.
E-mail feedme@thetimes.co.uk if you know somewhere I should try, and maybe we’ll go there together. Although probably not.
