In May Heston Blumenthal's London restaurant Dinner went straight into the top 10 of The World's 50 Best Restaurants - making it only one of three UK establishments in the list. Matthew Fort, Great British Menu judge & Great British Chefs strategic advisor visited before it achieved this accolade. He recently returned for lunch to see what, if anything, had changed.
Meat Fruit Photo by Irene
Review of Dinner for Great British Chefs by Matthew Fort
Same old, same old. After a break of several months I went back to Dinner for lunch. If I say not a lot seems to have changed, I mean it as a fanfare of praise. The standards remain astonishingly high. True, most of the dishes can be counted as old friends.
The meat fruit is still there, and the lamb broth is still there, and the roast scallops with cucumber ketchup, cucumber hearts, borage and bergamot. There’s the black foot pork chop with Hispi cabbage and Robert sauce, roast turbot with cockle ketchup, the tipsy cake and taffety tart.
Tipsy Cake with Grilled Pineapple Photo by Fahara
Those little, refreshing touches of bitterness were still in place, and there had been no blunting of the sweet/sour combinations, so notably evident in the numerous ‘ketchups’.
The Chocolate Bar at Dinner photo by Feline DaCat
But, as is the way with Ashley Palmer-Watts, the Cook Regent at Dinner, and Heston Blumenthal, nothing quite remains the same. Just as at the Fat Duck, dishes go through a prolonged, possibly never-ending, process of refinement, so it was as if all my old friends at Dinner had undergone a mysterious face-lift. Their essential selves remained the same, but they seemed sharper, clearer, the contrasts in temperature, texture and flavour that much cleaner. Each dish rode in with an air of absolute confidence.
Chicken Cooked in Lettuce at Dinner - Photo by Feline DaCat
But it wasn’t all about meeting old friends, and wondering at their eternal youth. I was happy make some new ones, too. The seductive power and apparent simplicity of chicken cooked with lettuces was only achieved through exceptional technical command and absolute concentration on each element of the dish. A vegetarian dish might have been called A Made Dish of Parmesan, but in fact it was a celebration of the virtues of cauliflower, which aren’t always obvious to the casual observer. And then, among the past delights of the pudding section there was a very seasonal Tarte of strawberries with macerated strawberries, chamomile, orange blossom cream and strawberry sorbet on an unsung, thin wafer of almond. This contrived to taste more of strawberries than strawberries do.
Perhaps our ancestors might not have readily recognised their original recipes in the reinvented contemporary Dinner versions of the dishes. However, they are the source of inspiration and made you, me, anyone with half a brain, realise that this country once had as sophisticated a cooking culture as anywhere on the planet, and will continue to do so if Dinner has the scale of influence it should have.
Photo of Dinner by Ewan-M
Dinner is not without it less attractive irritations. There are still prolonged pauses when the restaurant needs to get a drink from the bar, which is run by the hotel; and the wine list is punishingly priced. But the service combines youthful verve with mature professionalism and the whole place runs with that kind of crisp ease you find in top Parisian brasseries.
Dinner by Heston Blumenthal, Mandarin Oriental Hotel, 66 Knightsbridge, London, SW1X 7LA 020 7201 3833
Review of Dinner for Great British Chefs by Matthew Fort
Have you had any unusual dishes like Meat Fruit? What savoury dishes benefit from the addition of fruit? Let us know over on Great British Chefs Facebook Page
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