this one's going to haunt me for the rest of my life
It's time for pudding! I love pudding. The dessert section of the menu was rather good, as you'd expect. My favourite dessert was the first one, which was actually two on the same plate; a Bavarois of Lychee and Mango, and a Blackcurrant Sorbet topped with a wafer. The bavarois was deliciously sweet and fruity, made special by the unexpectedly tasty addition of savoury, salted pine nuts and some tiny blackcurrant and peppercorn jellies, which looked innocent enough, but packed a surprisingly fiery punch that gave Nikki a shock, because she was the first to try it. Her face was hilarious, but of course meant that the rest of us weren't as shocked because we were expecting something odd.
As tasty and interesting as the bavarois was, it was the Blackcurrant Sorbet which did it for me. It did it so much for me that I suspect it's going to be one of those things I end up randomly craving for the rest of my life - in fact it's making my mouth water just typing this. And I don't even like blackcurrant all that much. I don't hate it, it's just not a flavour I specifically seek out at all. Mind you, when I was a toddler I was addicted to Ribena (my mum tells me I refused to have anything else put in my bottle), so this taste for blackcurrant flavour isn't really anything new, although I've never tasted anything so intensely blackcurranty before, except maybe some blackcurrant wine, once. It wasn't just the flavour, it was the way it was so cold as well. Of course it was cold, it was a sorbet. But it was quite a solid, dense sorbet, without feeling packed full of ice the way most sorbets are. The coldness was why the intense flavour was so surprising, because colder temperatures tend to dull flavours. I can only imagine how intense the flavour was before it was frozen!
And then there was the delicate flake, garnishing the sorbet, which appeared to have the flavour of roasted beetroot, and was again an unlikely flavour to find so perfectly accompanying something unexpected. Marvellous.
After this, I was ready for anything again, and what we got was the first course of the famous "breakfast" part of the menu. Again, I got disappointed here, but this time it was because I realised that the meal had reached its final section and was coming to an end.
The Parsnip Cereal with Parsnip Milk was quite fun, and tasty as well. It was probably the only dish I could imagine being succssful in a mass market, and not just because it came packaged in its own little box. It was a fun way to mess with standard conventions again, demonstrating with playful irony that food doesn't have to be put into little boxes - in this case, the little box that says parsnips aren't dessert food, even though they can be sweet enough.
And then it was the dish that the Heston-haters love to pick on, the one which causes people to call him Dr Frankenfood and all the rest. This is the dish that everyone else most wants to try, and well they should, because it's a lot of fun, as much as anything. Out came the nitro-cooker again, as we sat in awe and watched as the waitress cracked a couple of eggs and we watched the already-beaten mixture run into the pan. Later, we speculated on how they managed to get the mixture into the eggs, summising that they must be injected with a hypodermic needle. I already suspected this, and being sat closest to the waitress I tried hard to keep an eye out for clues, but I suspect that there really is magic involved - Magic Circle kind of magic, anyway. It's the perfect environment for plenty of deflection and sleight of hand, as most people would be too entranced by the nitrogen swirling around to notice anything else.
Before we ate our egg-and-bacon ice-cream, we were given one of the other trademark gimmicks, the tea that's hot and cold at the same time. From discussions with friends, I'd already worked out how this was done, so I wasn't too surprised by its arrival. It is a slightly odd sensation to have both hot and cold in your mouth at the same time, but not really any different to the simultaneous hot and cold you get with, say, a fresh-out-of-the-oven crumble served a la mode. Different flavours and textures, though, obviously. Nikki had trouble getting her head around it, but I find myself wondering if that's because she's more of a tea drinker than I am, so she has stronger expectations of what tea should feel like.
As for the egg-and-bacon ice-cream, I didn't notice much of a bacon flavour, but the scrambled egg was quite strong. Actually, it was quite delicate, but it was more distinct than the bacon. I think the trouble was that the pain perdu must have been over-soaked in caramel, because it was sickeningly sweet, which really spoiled the overall effect and flavour of everything else because it was far too overwhelming. I read a few reviews with interest yesterday, and noticed that we'd lost another item on the tasting menu, a sharp-flavoured tea jelly, which sounded like the perfect antidote to the sickliness of the bread. So, in the end, I was amused and delighted by the spectacle and disappointed by the flavour, because one of the original component parts was missing. This is interesting to note because the menu is changing in July and I wonder if they're going to put some things back.
I thought that was going to be the last dish on the set menu (having lost count), but we had more to come. The next thing on the menu was interesting, more for the discussion of flavours it sparked off, than for the dish itself. It was a Chocolate Wine Slush served with Millionaire Shortbread and a little card with some information about its origins. There was no real reason why this particular course should come with background information if the previous ones didn't, and in fact it made me wish that the others had, because of course we were curious about them. It also wasn't as interesting a piece of ephemera as the pamphlet that came with a dish that had been on the previous menu. The dish itself was okay, largely because the slush had an intriguingly familiar flavour that none of us could identify until I realised that its appearance reminded me somewhat of a blackberry milkshake, at which point I made the leap and recognised that it had a blackberry-like flavour, too. But it was Billy who noticed that I said blackberry-like, and pointed out that was different to blackberry-flavoured, and that got me wondering about some of my reactions to flavours based on their appearances in previous courses.
This one was mostly remarkable as a talking point, as I mentioned, prompting a conversation about unlikely flavours that work well together. Things like strawberries with black pepper, or cheese and marmalade. This prompted Chris to suggest apple pie with a slice of sharp cheddar melted on top (a dish I know my friend Jen also enjoys), and Billy to suggest McDonald's fries dipped into McDonald's strawberry milkshake, the latter of which made Nikki squeal, "you're going to get us thrown out, talking like that!" But actually, I think St. Heston would approve of such experimentation. Hey, if it works, why not, right? Bizarrely enough, on Sunday evening one of my friends on Facebook sent me an invite to a ridiculous group entitled "McDonald's fries dipped in chocolate shake is the yummiest thing ever!!". Who'd have thought this discussion was actually a zeitgeist?1 (No, I didn't join.)
And that's all the desserts, but it's not the end of the meal. Tune in for part five soon.
1Even more disturbingly, when trying to find the link to that group, I discocvered that there is a whole raft of these groups on FB. Maybe they all ought to consolidate.
This is pt.4 of my Fat Duck restaurant review.
Read all the parts here: part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 | part 5