IN a Chicago restaurant they are serving chocolate pudding tied in knots; in Tokyo truffle-flavoured paper is on the menu, while in London Lawrence Wale serves parmesan ice-cream to his dinner guests.

The culinary fad for combining unlikely ingredients in avant-garde dishes is spreading round the world after being made famous by chefs such as Heston Blumenthal, proprietor of the Fat Duck restaurant in Bray, Berkshire, and creator of snail porridge.

The technique has now moved beyond the world of expensive restaurants with the recent opening of Bacchus, Britain’s first “molecular gastro-pub”, in Hoxton, north London. There is also a growing band of home cooks — including Wale, a 50-year-old business consultant, and his wife Maureen — who have bought high-tech kitchenware to show off to guests their laboratory-developed techniques known as “molecular gastronomy”.

While some purists have condemned the technique as gimmicky, Blumenthal said its growing popularity was because dining is increasingly being treated as a theatrical spectacle. “We’re looking at restaurants as places of entertainment,” said Blumenthal, who is a food columnist for The Sunday Times. He is perfecting black forest gateau-flavoured flying saucers, based on the rice paper-covered children’s sweets. The texture of the paper is proving problematic.

Blumenthal added: “What is really exciting is that there is now so much of this information and equipment available to the personal cook at home.”

The trend was begun by Ferran Adria, nicknamed the “Salvador Dali” of cooking, who runs El Bulli restaurant in Roses, Spain, named by Restaurant magazine this year as the best in the world.

Adria brought industrial and scientific methods into his kitchens and used liquid nitrogen to freeze food in front of customers’ eyes. He closes El Bulli from October to March so that his chefs can develop new techniques at his laboratories in Barcelona.

Blumenthal was one of the first to take up Adria’s techniques and they have now been adopted around the world. At Alinea in Chicago, Alex Stupak, the pastry chef, uses a chemical which goes into toothpaste to make chocolate dessert that can be stretched, chopped up and tied in knots but still retains a pudding texture.

The first similar restaurant in Japan opened recently at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Tokyo. The Tapas Molecular Bar offers a 15-course menu, including one consisting of a sheet of tissue paper infused with truffle flavouring.

The trend has spread in Britain, with molecular restaurants now open in cities including Leeds, Nottingham and Cambridge.

The latest invention being taken up by chefs is the Gastrovac, designed by Sergio Torres, another Spanish chef, in conjunction with scientists at Valencia Polytechnic University.

British chefs are among hundreds who have bought the device. They include John Campbell at the Vineyard in Stockcross, Berkshire. His Gastrovac offerings include baby pigeon poached in treacle.

The food and whatever liquid it is to be cooked in are placed together in the machine. The air is then sucked out, enabling cooking to occur at far lower temperatures than usual — water, for example, boils at only 55C in a vacuum. This preserves flavours, colours and textures that would be broken up at higher temperatures.

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