Best in the world
The UK has long been the subject of jokes about the bad quality of our food but now this might be behind us. A UK village restaurant has been declared the best in the world, and 13 other British restaurants were among the top 50 places to eat.

The Fat Duck restaurant in the village of Bray in the English county of Berkshire was named as the world’s best place to eat by a panel of 600 international chefs and critics.

Fat Duck dishes
The Fat Duck is owned by chef Heston Blumenthal whose style of cooking is often described by foodies as ‘molecular gastronomy’. He explained to The Times newspaper exactly what was meant by this. ‘I like to experiment with different tastes and flavours of sweet and savoury to show they have no boundaries. People expect ice-cream to be sweet, but the Victorians ate it savoury. Cucumber ice, for example, with fresh cucumber was common as a starter…’

So what actually turns up on the Fat Duck’s menu to make it such an exciting place to eat? Well, if you dined there tonight you might try nitro-green tea and lime mousse, which is dipped in liquid nitrogen to make it cold, smoked bacon and egg ice-cream, sardine on toast sorbet or snail porridge. It was this last dish that the UK media really picked up on when they reported the Fat Duck being voted best in the world – probably because snails and porridge are two things many people think they would never want to eat and here they are combined on one dish!

New things?
These different dishes may reflect the fact that the British are more willing to try new things and experiment with what they eat. Not all of us may want to go as far as snail porridge but increased access to food from other cultures means that the UK has moved on from the days of meat and two veg.

Now that we have discovered foods from around the world British chefs are beginning to fuse these into new and distinctly British dishes, as Heston Blumenthal is doing.

Stella
July/August 2005

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