Actually, I should say something about the atmosphere, because it was one of the least stuffy restaurants I've ever eaten in. The food is not the only reason that The Fat Duck regularly ends up listed in the top two restaurants in the entire world. The staff were all, as I said before, utterly charming, but also extremely conscientous, appearing non-intrusively whenever needed, and melting away when they weren't. They were happy to wait while the others took photographs, or to join in a discussion about the merits (or lack of them) in blue cheese. Sometimes their French accents almost bordered on caricature and it was a little hard to understand what they were telling us, but since we were all so willing to go along for the ride, it didn't really matter, especially as we were given souvenir menus to take home and peruse at our leisure. Of course, we could have opened the envelopes at the table, to see what each course was as we went along, but they were beautifully sealed (with a proper embossed seal) and it seemed a shame to open them and risk spilling food all over the beautiful paper. Actually, these envelopes are worth mentioning, too. They're made of thick paper which has an almost calfskin-like quality, with a soft pile that makes you want to stroke it, and creates a tactile sensation that has a similar effect to some of the flavours in the dishes. They'd be strangely covetable even if they didn't come replete with the smart black embossed Fat Duck seal on them. Another example of the wonderful attention to detail.

It's hard to pick favourites after all the amazing food we ate — the oak moss, the edible seaside and that intense blackcurrant sorbet being just a few — but the cheese course turned out to be one of my favourites because it was the most communal. We all picked out different cheeses from the extensive selection, and there was much reaching across and around the table in order to share them. My favourite was one of the light goat's cheeses, which had a pretty brown rind that looked almost like tree bark, although it was probably the incredibly gooey yellow one that Chris had chosen which will be the most memorable, even if I didn't like it as much. It was so runny that it looked like homemade custard, and was served on a spoon and oozed all over the plate; very strong in flavour with an umami effect that was a little overwhelming compared to the lightness of most of the cheese I'd chosen. Again, probably one I would have appreciated a bit more if I hadn't already eaten so much rich food.

And even after that, our meal still wasn't finished. We were offered hot beverages from a rather dauntingly full tea menu, studiously avoiding the £35.00 price tag of one tea, although our curiosity was piqued (it's an "aged" tea with a 1970s vintage; one for the tea connoisseur). Nikki chose one of the Puerh teas, but it was brewed too strong for my tastes, so I was glad that I had opted for the Jasmine Pearls Green Tea, blended from Jasmine Dragon Pearls, Dragon Phoenix Pearls and Moli Long Zhu, hand-rolled and then scented with jasmine six times. It had a lovely delicate flavour and a delicious perfume which I found so evocative that I found myself "remembering" places I'd never even been to; cities in the Far East that I've always daydreamed about visiting. This was ehanced by the Mandarin Aerated Chocolate, as the jasmine tea complemented its flavour rather nicely, bringing out the sharp mandarin flavour of the chocolate to wonderful effect. There was also a wonderfully smooth mouthfeel to the chocolate, which was almost like sucking a pebble, or rather like the way you hope a smooth pebble would feel in the mouth, but never does. (What do you mean you've never put a pebble in your mouth?)

The Apple Pie Caramels were quite nice, but mostly remarkable for the fact that their wrappers were edible as well, so you could put the whole thing in your mouth. Which frankly raises the point of them being wrapped in the first place, but oh well, it was clever. The Violet Tartlets were also delicious, benefitting from the same salted caramel flavour that you get with Ladurée macarons, although I unfortunately didn't really notice any of the violet flavour, which was a little disappointing. I think by this point though, I'd actually become a little intoxicated by all the food, all those flavours combining to make me quite tipsy, making me wonder if a shorter tasting menu might actually offer more benefit.

Fifteen or sixteen courses is amazing, and all of them were wonderful, but after a while it is quite easy to become almost inured to the new experiences provided by each course, because there is too much to take in; by the time we got to the end of the meal I'd become quite blasé about it all. Don't get me wrong, I had a fantastic time eating all of the courses — obviously, or I wouldn't have written five posts' worth of reviews. I'd happily sit through the same menu again (although perhaps with some substitutions for the salmon and the pigeon — to try other new dishes as much as anything), but I would have been just as happy with a menu that was half as long and half the price. I still would have experienced some amazing dishes the like of which I'll probably never taste again, and I still would have had a lovely time discussing the synaesthetic qualities of all those things, but I don't think I would have become quite so blasé towards the end. Plus, if it was half the length and half the price, I could afford to do it again sooner rather than later! Because I definitely do want to do it again. Only a person who really hates food would say no to five hours of culinary inventiveness designed to evoke memories and debates and interest. And while I can't afford to dine out at the Fat Duck for a while (or anywhere else, really), I can at least dine out on my memories for a while.

This is pt.5 of my Fat Duck restaurant review.
Read all the parts here: part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 | part 5

However, it has to be said that knowing what to expect visually still doesn't prepare you for the uncommon sensation of eating a frozen meringue filled with the fresh flavours of matcha and lime, especially when the vapours come out of your nose. To enhance the flavours, the waitress spritzed a mist of oil over the table, which provided an incredibly intense burst of lime that was absolutely delicious, adding to the sensation of the flavours already shooting up your nose to hit the back of your throat¹. We were already at a loss for words to describe our experience; as Nikki said, "that didn't taste as green as I was expecting." I thought it tasted very green, but it was a sharp, bright green, conjuring up images of young bamboo in white rooms, rather than the verdant green of a lawn. How much of this sort of association was down to the colours of the food was a subject for quite a bit of discussion over the course of the day — the rest of the meal was to be as synaesthetic as the opener, with many of our descriptions conjuring up colours or textures rather than flavours.

After our perfectly-formed palate cleanser, we were offered bread and unpasteurised butter. I never get tired of eating really good bread with really good butter (yes, that is part of why I'm such a fatty) and these were both pretty good. We soon cottoned on that the bread would be offered around whenever there was a dish that might potentially need some sopping up, and so took advantage of every slice offered — all except for Billy, who made the mistake of saying he was okay for bread and then had his bread plate taken away. Lesson learned; always say yes to the bread at a tasting menu.

The first proper dish of the day, Pommery Grain Mustard Ice-cream with Red Cabbage Gazpacho, was a small but beautifully formed delight, with a gorgeously coloured gazpacho splashed over a bullet-shaped portion of ice cream, swimming in the huge expanse of an elegant white plate. It's probably one of those dishes that causes people to harp on about Heston Blumenthal's mad scientist cooking, because of most people's associations of what ice-cream should taste like. Ice-cream is a dessert dish, isn't it? It shouldn't be savoury, right? Except, what rule is there to say that something made with cream and frozen shouldn't be savoury? What rule says that frozen cream has to have sugar added to it? This was something I'd been wondering myself recently, so it was great to actually taste what a savoury ice-cream could be like. If I was the kind of person who made their own ice-cream, I would be encouraged to experiment with all sorts of flavours after this. All the flavours of the dish were as perfectly formed as the way it was presented, with the sharpness of the gazpacho perfectly offsetting the mild heat of the mustard. Although I would never have thought to serve ice-cream in any sort of dressing (rum and chocolate sauce doesn't count), the textures were well suited, too, with the velvety creaminess mingling nicely with the thin liquid. The proportions were perfect, just enough to tantalise the tastebuds for the next course, without sating the appetite too much.

The next course was something rather special, and in fact I might even go so far as to say magical, at least in appearance. In the middle of our table was placed a smallish box, covered in a bed of oak moss. On this bed of oak moss sat some little plastic packets for each of us. So far, so pretty, so potentially pretentious. Except that the oak moss wasn't just there to enhance the visual presentation of the dish. In each little packet was a thin film to melt in our mouths, on the same principle as a breath-freshener, only this one was flavoured with oak moss, too. As we placed them on our tongue, water was poured onto the box of oak moss in the middle of our table, which released the dry ice hidden underneath. Suddenly our table was enveloped in a beautiful swirling mist, and the taste of oak moss in our mouths was enhanced by the subtle scent of the oak moss on the table, all to further enhance the even more subtle flavour of oak moss to be discovered on our truffle toast (truffles are found under oak trees).

And this was only one magical part of the course, because we still had the other half of it. This was served in a funny little tilted cup that strongly resembled Aarnio's Ball Chair, prompting me to say that it really needed a little white cat and someone plotting evil for it to be properly complete — but I'm not sure what they could have added to an already wonderfully complex dish. Inside the cup were layers of flavours; a Parfait of Foie Gras, Cream of Langoustine, Quail Jelly and, unexpectedly, a bright green pea purée right at the bottom. The combination of flavours was quite intense, and reminded me suddenly and surprisingly of sitting in the dining room at my great aunt's house; a place I've not seen since she died in 1993. Odd. Especially as I never ate foie gras, langoustine or quail at her house — but a nice memory alI didn't want the course to end, because sitting in that swirling and roiling mist of oak moss was utterly enchanting.

However, even though it did have to end, it was only to move onto the next exciting culinary experience; the famous Snail Porridge (or the infamous Snail Porridge as some naysayers would rather have you believe. I find it interesting that the naysayers, the Heston-haters, are always people who've never eaten any of his food). Like many people, I'd never eaten snails before, because the idea of eating them when you see them uncooked is understandably not all that enticing. Cooked, however, they look more like cooked mushrooms, of which I am fond. They seemed to have a similar texture to mushrooms, too, but with a slightly meatier taste. This may have been down to the flavour of the ham permeating the dish, but it's interesting to note that although I did recognise the ham taste, I didn't immediately connect its familiarity to the thing that produced it, until I saw it listed on the menu later. (This mental disconnect between recognised flavour and the thing that produced it was a phenomenon that we all experienced at regular intervals during the meal, so I will come back to it.)

When I say that this dish was good peasant fare, I don't mean that negatively. I mean that it was hearty and comforting, made with simple ingredients, but solid with flavour. The one thing I really remember about this dish was saying to Nikki, "now, this one really does taste green." And it did, even though now that I'm sitting here recalling it I can remember how the ham flavour came through when I was eating; at the time I was eating it I didn't register the porky-pinkness that ham usually suggests. It's probably because the dish was very green, to look at. As I said before, how much of the flavours we found were down to the colour of the food we were eating?²

I have to say at this point that I was disappointed to discover that the edible Stroop test was no longer on the menu when we were there, because it seemed likely to be the perfect example of colour influencing flavour, and I would have loved to try it. (Take two items of like consistency but different flavour, give them colours that suggest the opposite of what their flavours are, e.g. beetroot and orange jellies coloured orange and red respectively. Confused? Well, yes.)

In fact, since I started looking things up to write these posts, I've noticed that there were a number of dishes missing from our tasting menu. No oyster with passionfruit jelly and lavender, no sardine-on-toast ice-cream with mackerel and daikon — although that has been replaced by something which does seem more special. However, I'm not going to talk about that one yet, because there was another dish that came first. But I think this post is long enough now, so it's time to take a break before I start part three.

¹I actually had a preview of this dish before the rest of the table; on the way back from the toilet, I was hit by the most amazing waft of lime trailing up the stairs before I even knew what it was. Most of the other tables at the restaurant were also working through the tasting menu, and every time that initial palate-cleansing starter course occurred I was able to take huge great sniffs to fill my nostrils with that wonderfully intense lime mist. I wish I could have some to spray in my flat. Heston Blumentahl should market it as room freshener; I'd buy loads!

²Interesting aside; I just looked up "flavour" on my computer's dictionary, to discover its secondary meaning: "2: Physics: a quantized property of quarks that differentiates them into at least six varieties (up, down, charmed, strange, top, bottom). Compare with color ." So I compared it with "colour" and learned: "5: Physics: a quantized property of quarks which can take three values (designated blue, green, and red) for each flavor." And now I wonder how to find out more about this sort of thing without melting my brain too much. Can anyone recommend a good primer in about this stuff that doesn't require any prior scientific knowledge to understand?

This is pt.2 of my Fat Duck restaurant review.
Read all the parts here: part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 | part 5