The Fat Duck

Who was it? John Regevalk.

He went to the Fat Duck and he told me that he did like a phone call booking.

And in the phone call, I'm not sure if it was a phone call or an email or whatever, but they asked him about, or at some point he commented that he was on a recent trip to Turkey.

And they did something about that.

Yeah.

But then when we went to the, 'cause Chris and I went to The Fat Duck.

I've sort of come full circle with it, and I just think it's bollocks.

Yeah.

Um, and we knew this guy-

He was the Fat Duck.

He was in the original Fat Duck team.

Mm.

You know? Yeah.

And we knew this guy was coming from the Fat Duck.

You know, we were like, "Right, okay." 'Cause a lot of people, you know, the chefs had moved on, and usually a lot of chefs just follow each other.

Mm.

Bravo, but also from the world of chefing at a very high level.

I mean, not everybody could stodge at the Fat Duck.

So, Chef Ben, I'm kind of impressed with that.

Ben Robinson, you can see him here tonight at the Manhattan Beach Food and Wine with this incredible Wagyu presentation that he's doing.

He gestures his colleagues over to a fence post that he now believes to be the former Republic of Ireland striker.

He quickly falls into a deep sleep and dreams of the day he saw the matinee performance of Phantom of the Opera in London's West End and then had dinner at Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck restaurant.

Lamb's liver and aniseed ice cream.

Whatever next? I just want a prawn mayo sauny.

What it really is was changing your ability to, to break the constructs of how you're able to view and create something.

And him and Heston at Fat Duck were instrumental in being that voice for the avant-garde.

And it wasn't about molecular gastronomy being about, uh, foams and shit, it was like using rigorous methods of science.

Mm-hmm.

We were getting inundated by what our readers were eating.

And not very... experienced people and yes some of the voices were negative some people didn't like the change some didn't like what was happening but it was it was very easy actually to follow to follow the trail i remember when when the fat duck first opened in 95 we had a an inspector that lives not that far away and went really soon after it opened and it was nothing like the fat duck it went on to become just a really good bistro but she immediately picked up that this place was was fantastic really right from the get-go i'm very impressed that she did um and so we were you know it I would never underestimate that.

I think that was culturally why we were, it predates, it was published by the Consumers Association.

And it was all really about, our job was to curate all this information coming in from all these readers and then put our judgment onto it, send out really experienced inspectors to filter it down and then tell our readers what we thought.

it be? What, you reckon over a buffet somewhere,

do you? The Fat Duck or something? Heston Blumenthal's.

Where would you, where would it be? Would it be? That's a great question.

Or over some dumplings?