He said he has got as far as he can with the “current format” – after all if you’re consistently voted the best restaurant in the world, the only way is down – and wants to get some creative juice back. “It’s like telling John Galliano to go work in a factory,” a tired-looking Adria said of the last few years.
When you’ve got food writers hanging round you like groupies, it’s easy to sit back on your laurels and stay with a tried-and-tested formula, and train up protégés to do the hard work for you while you swan around stuffing your face with Jaffa Cakes, and I think many chefs would applaud the 47-year-old for not taking the easy option.
In fact, many would applaud him for escaping the hellish prison of running a three-star Michelin restaurant and the whirlwind stress of constantly having to do better to satisfy clients.
I think celebrity chefs like Heston Blumenthal, owner of the second best restaurant in the world, could take a (no doubt edible, exploding, nitro-green) leaf out of his recipe book – well another one at least anyway.
When I worked at the Fat Duck nearly four years ago, some of the chefs felt they were on a treadmill just banging out the same immaculate but identical dishes year after year – a common complaint in Michelin-starred eateries. There was little creative buzz or inspiration, just long hours standing on your feet in a cramped furnace.
They longed for a la carte orders, but most customers stuck to the famous tasting menu (only a pompous fool with the ‘gentlemen’s disease’ calls it a degustation menu) and they longed for a revamp of that.
The Fat Duck is sometimes described as being a restaurant you dine at once in your life – mainly because of the expense and tick-it-off mentality of trainspotting gourmets rather than the quality of the cooking – so it doesn’t really matter if the menu remains the same for decades. But isn’t it good to take a chance and bring in fresh ideas – especially from the brigade doing the cooking for you?
Although I never managed to get in there, I have it on good authority that Blumenthal has a laboratory above the prep room run by elves who experiment with wondrous dishes such as poached cockatrice eggs that allow you to fly round the garden, and dormouse wine gums that send diners back to early Roman Britain. But it seems to be more of a prop for his TV shows.
I dug out an old tasting menu in the ‘stagier handbook’ they gave me during my stage at the Fat Duck. Comparing it to the present degustation menu (oh, the gentlemen’s disease!) it seems very little has changed in those years.
The nitro-green tea and lime mousse, pommery grain mustard and gazpacho, and snail porridge dishes were still there. As was the egg and bacon ice cream.
And there were small tweaks to some of the other dishes. The quail jelly was now served with crayfish cream rather than langoustine cream. The salmon poached with liquorice was served with golden trout roe (there was no mention of the dreaded grapefruit – had they finally taken pity on those poor, deformed stagiers locked away in the dungeon?) The poached breast of Anjou pigeon pancetta was now a 300-year-old dish called powdered Anjou pigeon. And the parsnip cereal was still there.
The new additions were roast foie gras, mock turtle soup (a sort of crazy, deranged tribute to the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party), something called taffety tart (circa 1660), and whisky wine gums. In fact, not much had changed but the price – a 50% increase in just less than four years.
Explaining his reasons for throwing in the apron, Adria said he was finding the gruelling, 15-hour days at El Bulli “difficult” and it was impossible coming up with new stuff while spending your whole life toiling over hot ovens. And I think Blumenthal should follow his example. Give up working noon and night, and reward himself with a well-deserved break to recharge his batteries. Those TV programmes can be hard work.