Last year it came second. This year it scooped the top award. The Fat Duck in Bray, once a pub, has now been voted the best restaurant in the world by a panel of critics and peers.

This is a remarkable achievement for a restaurant that is only in its 10th year and whose chef/proprietor, Heston Blumenthal, is self-taught.

Blumenthal's story is an extraordinary one. He left school with six O-levels and worked as a photocopier salesman and credit controller for his father's business.

Some 14 years later he lectures Nobel prize winners in physics on the science of food and taste, or molecular gastronomy as it has come to be known; corresponds with the likes of Harold McGee, the author of Science and Lore of the Kitchen, Charles Spence, a professor of experimental psychology at Oxford University and Tony Blake, the vice-president of research at Firmenich, the world's largest flavouring company; and creates some of the most remarkable and delicious food in the country.

Some people have found the idea of dishes such as snail porridge, cauliflower risotto with chocolate jelly, chips that take three days to prepare and carrot toffee as bizarre at best, but the critics and guides, with very few exceptions, have been unanimous in their praise.

Perhaps even more remarkably, it is difficult to find a fellow chef who has anything but appreciation for what Blumenthal and the Fat Duck represent, even if few of them actually understand his cooking.

It is true that Blumenthal's fascination with the processes of taste, memory, and the physical transformation of ingredients through cooking have a considerable influence on the development of specific dishes, but they are never produced simply with a desire to shock.

Pleasure, the desire to produce pure and perfect flavours, to create that sense of surprise and delight that we feel when we first encounter certain flavours as children, lies at the heart of his cooking.

Of course, such an award is not given to a restaurant just for its food. It is for the whole experience - service, wine list, atmosphere. In this respect, the Fat Duck is almost as unusual as its food.

Although the building has long lost its pub associations, the restaurant is the least stuffy, most approachable of haute cuisine establishments.

It has none of the hushed reverence and crushing ritual that traditionally characterise such places. The front of house staff, like those in the kitchen, are characterised by their youth, energy and professionalism. It makes eating there a remarkably relaxed and cheery experience.

A year ago I went to Slow Food's Salone del Gusto in Turin with Blumenthal. After an hour or two of touring the astonishing range of artisanal food stalls, I was exhausted. No matter, he said, he was happy to go off on his own. He had noticed, he said, four different varieties of lentils, each of which had, he thought, different characteristics and he wanted to find out more about them because he needed some with specific characteristics for a dish he was working on. And off he went, unassuming, cheery and utterly absorbed.

After years of not quite believing in the excellence of our own restaurant culture (in spite of the annual hype), it may come as a surprise that so many of the restaurants among the top 10 are British - Gordon Ramsay, Tom Aikens and St John all feature. It would be unkind, perhaps, to suggest that this reflects a nationality bias among the judges. However, there is no doubt that the Fat Duck is a great restaurant and Heston Blumenthal the most original and remarkable chef this country has ever produced.

· Matthew Fort is the Guardian's food editor

Fat Duck Tasting Menu (£97.50)

Nitro-green tea and lime mousse, orange and beetroot jelly, oyster, passion fruit jelly, horseradish cream, lavender pommery grain mustard ice cream, red cabbage gazpacho, jelly of quail, langoustine cream, parfait of foie gras

Snail porridge
Jabugo ham, shaved fennel

Roast foie gras
Almond fluid gel, cherry and camomile

Sardine on toast sorbet
Ballotine of mackerel 'invertebrate', marinated daikon

Salmon poached with liquorice
Asparagus, pink grapefruit, Manni olive oil

Poached breast of Anjou pigeon pancetta
Pastilla of pigeon leg, pistachio, cocoa and quatre épices

White chocolate and caviar
Mrs Marshall's Margaret cornet
Pine sherbet fountain

Mango and douglas fir puree
Bavarois of lychee and mango, blackcurrant sorbet

Carrot and orange tuile
Bavarois of basil
Beetroot jelly

Smoked bacon and egg ice cream
Pain perdu, tea jelly

Leather, oak and tobacco chocolates
Praline rose tartlet

A selection of wines by the glass to accompany this menu £67.50

Selection of Champagne Taittinger by the glass to accompany this menu £90.00

An optional 12.5% service charge will be added to your bill

· Website: www.fatduck.co.uk