The Fat Duck
This month's issue of
Seed ("The New Face of Science/Culture") has an article on Heston Blumenthal's
Fat Duck restaurant in London. They compare Heston Blumenthal to Willy Wonka, and it's not far off. The mission of the Fat Duck is "molecular gastronomy," which means studying chemistry to screw with food. Here are some examples:
- A sorbet of green tea and lime foam served in a liquid nitrogen cauldron (-196C). "The tea opens the pores in your mouth, there's a touch of alcohol to clean your tongue, and the lime stimulates your saliva."
- Tryptophan-laced dessert to relax you as you're paying the bill.
- Greens blanched in low-calcium mineral water to create a brilliant green.
- Lamb cooked slowly at 54C (without braising) to make it entirely pink and succulent.
- Snail porridge.
- Caramel with cumin.
- Green crab ice cream.
- Bacon and eggs ice cream.
- Mango puree with Douglas Fir essence.
- A spoonful of food that "would begin with a delicate whiff of basil, continue onto salty olive with a little bouquet of thyme, and end with a crescendo of cooked onion. (There's the Willy Wonka comparison.)
- Mustard ice cream with purple-cabbage gazpacho.
- Beluga caviar and white chocolate (similar profiles on the mass spectrometer).
- Chocolate cake with pop rocks.
It's strange stuff. I immediately wanted to go try everything on the menu, but then as I read more, it occurred to me that sure, this is cool and cutting-edge and miraculous sometimes, but I don't want to eat food to
think. That's what this food does; it makes you stop and wonder what's going on. The ostensible purpose is to make you aware of flavor like never before, but the price, it seems to me, is the wonder and joy of sharing food. The pleasure of eating is wrapped up in memory and association--unforced, nearly thought
less association--and unless you were raised in a lab, eating things that conjure up images pine forests while your mouth is on a tropical island just can't be pleasurable. Interesting and eye-popping, but not pleasurable.
Still, I can't help but respect a mad scientist. Let's put him in a room with Nikola Tesla, Gaetano Pesce, and oh I don't know, James Joyce.
* Ray, 9/26/2003 11:07:19 PM
