Head due west from London, and in less than an hour you come to the blink-and-you-miss-it village of Bray, population 7,000. Besides St. Michael's Church, the local cricket club and a clutch of ivy-clad Tudor-style mansions, there is precious little to see in Bray. You won't even find a shop or a post office on the narrow Elizabethan streets or beneath the weeping willows cascading over the Thames.
And yet, right now this tony Berkshire parish is home to the hottest restaurant in Britain or anywhere else in Europe: a 450-year-old former pub called the Fat Duck. Its creator, Heston Blumenthal, this year became only the third chef in the United Kingdom to win three Michelin stars. The accolade is all the more spectacular for having been scored faster than any in British Michelin history; Blumenthal won his first star only five years ago. To top it off, an international panel of 300 restaurateurs, chefs and critics has just named the Fat Duck the number two restaurant in the world, second only to the French Laundry, in Napa Valley, and beating out even El Bulli (Ferran Adrià's legendary avant-garde crucible on the Catalonian coast, the place that paved the way for Blumenthal's own brand of culinary experimentation). Not bad for a thirty-eight-year-old self-trained cook whose parents, he jokes, named him after a highway service station near Heathrow airport.
Like Adrià's, Blumenthal's odyssey into exploratory cooking was born of a reaction to everything he had previously learned coupled with a waggish desire to challenge conventional preconceptions about taste. His acolytes now flock from all over the globe to experience dishes that sound like the odd concoctions of a prankish schoolboy — smoked-bacon-and-egg ice cream, sardine-on-toast sorbet, caviar with white chocolate — but taste as earth-shatteringly divine as anything Adrià or the French Laundry's Thomas Keller prepares.
As a young lad, Blumenthal was smitten by all things Gallic. The spell was cast when, on a family vacation in Provence, his parents took him to the legendary Oustau de Baumanière: he was mesmerized by the sommelier with the handlebar mustache, the chariot-sized cheese trolley, the lobster sauce poured into soufflés. He began to devour French cookbooks — from which, he says, he learned to speak the language — but not as a hobby. He was on a mission to create his own restaurant.
Except for what he picked up during a stint at Raymond Blanc's Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons, in Oxford, all Blumenthal needed to know in the kitchen he learned on his own. After he'd held a string of jobs — including debt collector and office-equipment salesman — he and his wife pooled their savings, and in 1995 they bought what is now the Fat Duck. Up until 1998, the year he won his first Michelin star, he ran the place as a traditional French bistro. But then — like Newton as the apple landed on his head — he had an epiphany. While blanching beans, he accidentally discovered that to maintain their brilliant green color he did not, as classical kitchen lore dictates, have to add salt to the water. Retaining their color, he later found out, was dependent on the amount of calcium in the water: if it's low in calcium, you can boil vegetables beyond their half-cooked crunchiness and maintain their color.
The quest to find an explanation for this gastronomic blasphemy led Blumenthal to experts outside culinary circles: experimental psychologists, flavor researchers and the writer Harold McGee, whose seminal book On Food and Cooking debunks such myths as the necessity to brown meat in order to seal in the juices. Thus was born Blumenthal's obsession with what is commonly called molecular gastronomy, or, if you will, the science of taste. The fruits of his labor are captured in his most sublimely composed dish: salmon poached with licorice. The sweet, strong ooze of the licorice root manages to emphasize, rather than sublimate, the soulful river-rich flavor of the fish, and then the sprinkling of tart, fleshy pellets of grapefruit in the dish delicately detonates on the tongue, one by one, to draw out the layers of taste.
For a three-star "gastronaut" at the vanguard of Britain's culinary innovations, Blumenthal approaches his whole enterprise in a manner that is surprisingly light on pretensions. First there's the name; he can't remember where it originated, but clearly the Fat Duck aspires as much to Continental sophistication as a fish-and-chip shop. All who enter the restaurant must do so through a small wooden door right off Bray's busy High Street, above which hangs a plaque that reads "H. Blumenthal licensed to sell beers, wines and spirits for consumption on premises." There is no service entrance, nor even a proper sidewalk to buffer you from oncoming traffic. And there's no parking facility — unless you count the one at the village pub, on the corner.
Inside, it's all low ceilings, exposed beams and a rather unfortunate choice of green carpet that at least means well in its attempt to match the olive leather seating. Food presentation is de rigueur three-star minimalism: petite portions laid bare on white porcelain. But the big shocker is the kitchen: a broom-closet-sized galley that manages to seamlessly deliver as many as 700 plates of food daily.
