Pricey but bloody lovely
The Age
Tuesday March 15, 2011
Jay Rayner ventures into Dinner and isn't disappointed. Heston's Mission Impossible screens on Channel Seven next month.HANGING from the ceiling at Dinner by Heston Blumenthal is a set of large wooden sculptures. Apparently these mimic the leading of a stained-glass window at Westminster Abbey. Does it matter that most people eating there won't have the first idea, or see the connection between this elegant polished wood and the attempt to investigate Britain's culinary heritage, which is the restaurant's shtick? Does it matter that elements of the roast scallop with cucumber ketchup dish are drawn from a recipe published in the 1826 book The Cook and Housewife's Manual Mistress by Meg Dodds, given that none of us has ever tasted that original dish? It isn't as if Blumenthal is riffing on things such as Findus Crispy Pancakes, which many of us might have as a reference point.To be bloody irritating for a moment, the answer is yes and no. Let's be clear: restaurants are ephemeral. Oh, I could argue for their importance to the culture but only in an attempt to justify my job and stave off the pangs of self-loathing that come in the darkest hours of the night. The fact is, we do not need them. Nobody goes to restaurants to stave off rickets. We go for entertainment. That being the case, why the hell can't the entertainment be complete as long as the impresario knows what they are doing? But for all this culinary footnoting to matter, one thing has to be in place and that's the food. It has to be seriously good.At Dinner, it is.There are caveats. This is a hotel restaurant and, even allowing for the view of Hyde Park and the wood-and-leather outfitting, you can't escape the echo of next morning's breakfast buffet. Though you can see where the millions have gone, it is fearsomely expensive: just one glass of wine and we still managed a bill of 180 ($289). That wine list is aggressively priced, with nothing below 29 a bottle, before a skip to 35 and a jump thereafter to that place on the map marked "Here be Russian oligarchs". Blumenthal's promised to look at this.Oh but the cooking! There is the meat fruit, a play on an old English habit of making one food look like another. So here comes a glossy mandarin on a board, complete with dimpled skin. But it turns out to be a ball of soft chicken-liver parfait, with a subtle zing of citrus to its gel peel. This one item is destined to become a culinary icon. Others will copy it they shouldn't. Another starter brings scallops, seared on one side with cucumber ketchup. What makes the dish sing is a pitch-perfect acidity, a mark of almost all the saucing here.It is there in a salamagundi which doesn't mean much more than a whole bunch of things on a plate containing smoked chicken, nuggets of slippery bone marrow and an acidulated horseradish cream, and in a standout dish of roast turbot with cockles. The only item that doesn't strike home is the beef royale, a short rib that has, according to the menu, been slow-cooked for 72 hours. This has a curious rubberiness but I still wanted to lick the plate clean of its smoked-anchovy and onion puree. At the end comes pineapple roasted on a spit powered by a giant watch mechanism alongside a syrup-infused brioche.None of the dishes are the exercise in miniaturism that Blumenthal practises at The Fat Duck. They are bigger, more boisterous. But the same absurd attention to detail has gone into them.I am aware that I am regarded as being too much a friend of Blumenthal's. I could therefore overcompensate by bigging up the criticisms. But sod that. What use am I if I'm not honest? So here it is: Dinner by Heston Blumenthal may be expensive but it's also bloody lovely. Save up.Jay Rayner is The Guardian's restaurant critic.
© 2011 The Age
