The Fat Duck

Heston Blumenthal, chef/patron of The Fat Duck - previously a pub called The Bell Ringers - has chutzpah, it must be said, in taking on the culinary vicar of Bray, Michel Roux at The Waterside Inn. All the more so since - except for a short stint in the kitchen of Marco Pierre White - Blumenthal is self-taught. Inspiration, he says, comes from reading and eating when travelling in France and he cites Alain Chapel and Michel Bras as particular mentors. The dishes on the relatively short menu, although traceable to certain influences (including Roux), are singular. Like a scientist balancing an equation or a novelist polishing a sentence, Blumenthal seems to have worked and reworked his ideas until something approaching perfection is achieved. In the first course, a dish such as gel?e of mackerel with Gew?rztraminer shows the chef dealing with a not essentially alluring fish, curing and marinating it rather than cooking it, then suspending it in a limpid, flowery jelly dressed with herbs and a slightly acidic froth of tomato. A version of vichyssoise - quite diluted but strengthened by seaweed - conceals in its pale depths a poached oyster. What is presumably the signature dish, petit sal? of duck, is a duck leg brined before being slowly cooked with spices (a pronounced flavour of cloves underlines a certain hamminess in the result); the smoothest imaginable potato pur?e (quite Joel Robuchon) forms the accompaniment. Breaking down potatoes with olives and herbs in the cooking juice for a chicken dish is a nice domestic, yet sophisticated, touch. Energy and invention are sustained in the dessert course with ideas such as salted-butter caramel with cacao sorbet, and with experimentation such as the use of jasmine tea and orange flower water to flavour a cr?me br?l?e. The pub has been stylishly, quirkily rendered a restaurant and the sophisticated management and service give it a pleasingly foreign feel. There is no view of the river, but in pretty weather a courtyard at the back is brought into play.

The Fat Duck
1 The High Street, Bray, Berkshire, SL6 2AQ