From Times Online
June 3, 2010

Eating out should be as exciting as the cinema, theatre — or sweetshop

I’ve worked with a perfumer to create the smell of a sweetshop

Heston Blumenthal

I’m off to a festival next week — not Glastonbury, RockNess or Download, but the Cheltenham Science Festival, an annual celebration of science that takes the latest hot topics out of the lab and into the public domain, in the most accessible form, for five days of exploration, discussion and debate. Last year’s festival had a varied menu of presenters and subjects, including Lord Coe on the mindset needed to win, the penisologist Ed Sykes on the most unusual mating practices in the animal kingdom and Professor Robert Winston on whether science can make you happy.

And me, in an interview that ranged from cutting-edge kitchen tech to the difference between taste and flavour and the key role of the olfactory epithelium.

This year’s festival should be equally fascinating, featuring Will Whitehorn on space tourism, Brian Cox on the wonders of the solar system and Bill Bryson on the history of the Royal Society.

And me again! This time the organisers have invited me to be a guest director. For one session I’ll be in conversation with my friend the food science writer Harold McGee, for another the neuroscientist Professor Francis McGlone and I will be presenting a project of mine that gets to the heart of what my cooking is all about. I call it The Sweet Shop.

“Like a kid in a sweetshop” has always been one of the phrases I most overuse. It captures how I feel when I create a new dish or discover something amazing. Over time I came to realise that that childlike sense of fun and excitement was exactly the feeling I wanted diners to have at my restaurant, and I began to think seriously about how I might use the metaphor of the sweetshop to add to the excitement of dining at the Fat Duck.

So I’ve had developed a short animated film that I’ll be screening at the festival — a dream-like journey through intricately choreographed kaleidoscopic images of lime glaciers and swirling turtles and dissolving fob watches and playing cards dancing a Busby-Berkeley style routine that leads the viewer to the door of the most magical and enticing-looking sweetshop you can imagine, with tall arched windows flanked by pillars with candy-cane stripes and a door knocker in the shape of a duck’s beak.

As the door opens you can hear, but not see, a shopkeeper offering sweets that you might have wished for as a kid but never believed possible: apple pie caramels with edible wrappers, aerated chocolate that somehow has the savour of Jaffa cakes . . .

This is designed in part as a reward for broaching the regrettable, but inevitable, difficulties of booking a table at the Fat Duck. (It’s a small restaurant that can serve only 40 people a time.) Once diners have made their reservation they’ll get the password to access a website showing this film, which will generate excitement and whet the appetite for the meal to come. Many of the details in the film — the turtles, the cards and the watch, among others — are covert references to dishes on the menu, so when the diner actually comes to the restaurant there’ll be the pleasure of recognition, of spotting these visual cues and allusions. A playful extra dimension to the whole experience.

I’ve also worked with a perfumer to develop a “Smell of the Sweetshop” scent: a heady blend of, among other things, caramel, licorice, vanilla and citrus. (Citrus is what perfumers traditionally use to introduce an “upbeat” note to their creations.) The sense of smell is probably more potent than any other in triggering emotion and memories. I’m wondering about wiping a trace of it on the doorframe of the restaurant. The diners’ pulses might quicken a little with excitement as they enter, without them even knowing why.

And a vial of Smell of a Sweetshop will be part of a pink-and-white-striped paper bag of goodies that is given to diners when they leave (no sweetshop experience would be complete without a goodie bag), containing some of those impossible sweets the shopkeeper suggested — that apple pie caramel; the aerated chocolate — along with others: an edible playing card with the flavour of jam tarts, coconut baccy in its own pouch, a miniature sherbet dab. There’s a strong retro element at work here, provoking the kind of nostalgia we find both emotive and relaxing and comforting.

The audience at my Sweet Shop presentation will be given one of the bags. It’s a bit of fun but it introduces people to the kind of development that I think will be part of restaurant-going in the future. A modern restaurant needn’t just be a place to satisfy hunger. Cooking and eating should be about fun and pleasure, and all sorts of creative possibilities can help to bring that about. As long as it forms a natural part of a menu’s logic, restaurateurs should make use of technology such as holograms, lighting design and soundboxes. Or of magicians, artists, musicians, designers and scriptwriters, to produce a sensory experience as powerful as a trip to the cinema or theatre.

The Times Cheltenham Science Festival runs from June 9-13: cheltenhamfestivals.com/science