9.5/10
Telephone: 01628 626151
Address: High Street, Bray, Berkshire.
Open: Lunch, all week, noon-2.30pm (4pm Sun); dinner, Mon-Sat, 6.30-9.30pm.
Price: With a few beers, around £30 a head. Wheelchair access.
Outside a terraced house in the twee town of Bray, four Japanese clicked merrily away in accordance with the national stereotype. "You know why he's called Heston, don't you?" I said, sidling up to them outside the Fat Duck. "You don't? Well, he was born in the car park of the Heston services just up the M4. You can't miss it: it's the last one before London." I shouldn't have done it, of course, but I was hoping these visitors would have a story and a selection of service station forecourt photography with which to entertain friends and family when they get home.
A little later, and a few yards from the restaurant once voted the planet's finest by an international panel, the chef popped into his other gaff, the Hind's Head Hotel, and stopped for a chat. The shaven-headed Heston Blumenthal looks nothing like the sort of global culinary legend who attracts tourists with digital cameras (he looks more like a Rada-trained actor's idea of a mid-70s member of West Ham's Inter City Firm), nor does he carry an iota of Ramsonian swagger. Standing there nattering with religious zeal about an eccentric-sounding recipe for roast chicken, the chap seems just too good to be true.
So, tediously enough, does his pub, a low-ceilinged, wood-panelled Tudor building, warmed by real and gas fires, in which the only false touch is the winsome sign - "Duck Or Grouse" - above the front door. Heston has left the bacon and egg ice cream and all the molecular gastronomy over at the Fat Duck and in his mad scientist's laboratory on the way to the hotel car park, and installed Dominic Chapman to cook British food so ultra-traditional that it matches the building itself.
If you hate reading reviews that gush dementedly about dish after dish after dish, imagine what it's like having to write them. But what can you do? My friend and colleague Matthew Fort and I ordered like the gluttons we are, and had no choice but to rave about everything. The pea and ham soup we didn't, in fact, order, but we were treated to it anyway and it set the tone, being packed with chunks of great, fatty meat and tasting more intensely of its components than seemed strictly decent. Scotch eggs (£1.50 each) were majestic, the sausage meat laced with cayenne pepper. Fabulous, buttery potted shrimps (£8.25) came with a watercress salad and crunchy toast, and a delectable rabbit and bacon terrine with cucumber pickles (£7.75). Soused herrings (£7.50) were spectacular too, and came with a gutsy compote of beetroot and horseradish.
Looking around at the clientele as the starter plates were removed, one couldn't help wondering sourly what this Wind In The Willows stretch of the Thames, where you can barely move for beta-plus celebs and retired moneymen in tweed caps, has done to deserve this? Do these people know how blessed they are, or is this just somewhere to come when the gout's playing up and they daren't risk the nearby Waterside Inn?
That, of course, is their business. Ours was eating like pigs, and this we continued to do. Matthew's plump lemon sole came seductively browned with spicy butter and topped with a combination of tiny brown shrimps and cucumber - "Just a lovely, simple, traditional dish, cooked beautifully." As for my Lancashire hotpot (£14.75), in which chunks of melty lamb neck fought for space with oysters beneath a layer of crispy, thinly sliced potato, well, after decades of watching them line up for Betty Turpin's version at the bar of the Rover's Return, I finally take the point.
I won't bang on about the puds because I've started boring myself, but it seemed confirmation of Blumenthal's obsessive passion for his work that Quaking Pudding - a tremulous lump of paradise gently flavoured with cinnamon - arrived with a card explaining its 17th-century roots, the information supplied by historians at Hampton Court.
Afterwards, we waddled to the car park lab where we found the young genius experimenting with countless ingredients (including the world's most expensive chocolate) to make the ideal Black Forest gateau for a forthcoming TV show. I could have stayed all day, watching him experiment, but I had to nip off up the M4 on the way home to take a picture on my mobile, and the daylight wouldn't be holding for long.
