British chef Heston Blumenthal, famed for his bacon and egg ice cream, credits fans, friends and the ‘food explosion’ in Australia for his decision to move The Fat Duck to Melbourne for six months while the Michelin-starred restaurant is being renovated.
From February 2015, the Fat Duck menu, staff and high-tech equipment will be all set to recreate Blumenthal’s three-and-a-half-hour dining experience in Australia, featuring the likes of grain mustard ice cream, snail porridge and his Alice in Wonderland-inspired mock turtle soup.
The entertainment goes beyond smell, taste, touch and sight, as his Sound of the Sea dish transports diners to the beach with an iPod Shuffle tucked in a conch shell playing the sounds of splashing waves and seagulls.
The Fat Duck’s move is Blumenthal’s first opening outside Britain, where the 47-year-old has Dinner by Heston at the Mandarin Oriental in London and two pubs in the village of Bray.
The restaurant at Melbourne’s Crown casino will turn into Dinner by Heston Blumenthal when The Fat Duck returns home after renovations to the 375-year-old building near Windsor, England are done.
Blumenthal spoke to Reuters about Australia’s appeal, the disincentives to running a restaurant in New York and toying with the senses of his diners.
Why have you chosen Australia to open your first restaurant outside the UK?
I’ve actually got some really good friends there. The TV shows (Heston’s Feasts and How to Cook Like Heston) have done really well here from the UK. I’ve signed up for this relationship with Brevilles (appliances) and just started a relationship with Coles (supermarkets).
For me, it was looking at the location and the market. If I was coming over just to do a restaurant, it would be one thing. But I’m here anyway for the other things. We have massive Australian interest in the Duck. So many Australians come to the Duck in the UK.
What I love about the approach is Australia is much more open-minded through the food explosion that’s happened over here. I’d put Melbourne and Sydney in the top half dozen cities in the world to eat in, in terms of diversity of cuisine, quality, just the general food culture.
Melbourne is incredibly multicultural and there’s just an excitement and interest to try new things.
Do you feel like you’re being a traitor to the Mandarin?
No, because The Mandarin (hotels) aren’t in Australia and I know for the moment they have absolutely no plans to be in Australia.
We had a really serious look at New York. They (The Mandarin) wanted to do it. We wanted to do it. But the biggest problem there is the unions. I’ve got really good friends at top restaurants in New York who said to me: “If you get under the control of the unions, it’s just never going to work. Don’t touch it with a barge pole.” (Alain) Ducasse and (Joel) Robuchon both left New York because of that.
The costs are completely prohibitive. You can go into the kitchen and the kitchen porter who’s washing dishes has pots and pans stacked up to here and says the person whose job spec is to put the pots and pans away doesn’t arrive for another 10 minutes. Literally, if someone drops something on the floor and you say: “Can you pick that up?”, they say: “That’s not my job.”
Are you going to be looking at Australian ingredients for The Fat Duck menu in Melbourne?
We’ll be using all Australian ingredients. Instead of using langoustines, we might use yabbies (crayfish). We actually bought more Australian truffles this year than we did from France. They’re really good.
Are there any unusual Australian ingredients you’ll be looking at?
I’ve never eaten witchety grubs (larvae of moths) and I really want to. Some of the stuff like lemon myrtle (a native plant) that we don’t really see... saltbush, like a spruce rosemary branch.
But this is to bring most of the Fat Duck classics over here and to make sure they’re exactly the same quality we serve in Bray. That’s why we’re picking up everything. We’re picking the whole team up, all of the kit, the centrifuges, the rocket machine and the rotary evaporator.
What does the rotary evaporator do?
It’s a flavour enhancer. It can extract flavour from things at low temperature. For example, if you put chocolate in it, the chocolate and the water boil at 25˚C and then you collect the vapour, so you end up with chocolate water.