Dinner by Heston Blumenthal

Restaurant review, by Jay Rayner

Presentations - Restaurants

It's been the most anticipated opening of the year, but Heston Blumenthal's Dinner delights on every level.

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 like 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.

Dinner it is.

There are caveats. This is a hotel restaurant and, even allowing for the fabulous view of Hyde Park and the solid 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. 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, apparently a play on an old English habit of making one food look like another. So here comes a glossy bright-orange mandarin on a wooden board, complete with dimpled skin. But it turns out to be a ball of the softest chicken liver parfait you have ever eaten, with a subtle zing of citrus to its gel peel.

This one item - it is barely a dish - is destined to become a culinary icon. Others will copy it - they shouldn't. Another starter brings scallops, seared only on one side with cucumber ketchup, tasting of an English summer tea party on a mown lawn.

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 stand-out dish of roast turbot with cockles that shows off these glorious native molluscs to their best advantage. The only item which doesn't strike home is the beef royale, a shortrib that has, according to the menu, been slow-cooked for 72 hours. Say 72 hours to me and I will expect something so tender it will lose its integrity quicker than a new MP. This has a curious rubberiness. But I still wanted to lick the plate clean of its smoked-anchovy and onion puree.

And at the end comes pineapple roasted on a spit powered by a £70,000 giant watch mechanism alongside a soft, yeasty, syrup-infused brioche, or a brown-bread ice cream with bursts of savouriness from the very best of salted caramel.

None of these dishes is the exercise in miniaturism that Blumenthal practises at the Fat Duck in Bray. They are bigger, more boisterous; a hug rather than a tickle. But the same absurd obsessive-compulsive attention to detail has gone into all of them, and it shows. 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.

Source: www.guardian.co.uk