Ashley Palmer-Watts has a photograph on his iPhone which, although taken 10 months ago, still brings him out in a cold sweat. It is a picture of the bills from the first week of full service at Dinner, Heston Blumenthal's restaurant at London's Mandarin Oriental hotel in Knightsbridge where Palmer-Watts is head chef. Scrawled across the top of every single receipt, in black handwriting, is the name of the customer.
It reads like a roll call of respected food critics and chefs. There is Charles Campion of the London Evening Standard, Giles Coren of the Times and, of course, the Observer's Jay Rayner. There is Alain Ducasse, one of the most Michelin-starred chefs in existence. And there, somewhat incongruously, is Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson and former Blur bassist turned cheesemaker Alex James (who, it transpired, was reviewing the restaurant for the Sun). "On the first day, we had eight tables of critics," says Palmer-Watts, who was previously head chef at the Fat Duck. "Alain Ducasse tried to come on the first night but couldn't get in. He had to come on the second night instead."
Less than a year after opening, OFM readers have voted Dinner their restaurant of the year, a mark of the speed and scale of its success. Its 110 covers have been booked solid since the opening in January. Various critics declared it "astonishing", "sprinkled with magic dust" and "bloody lovely". Both Blumenthal and Palmer-Watts remain pleasantly surprised by the reaction. "It was the sheer level of expectation that made it so nerve-racking," says Blumenthal, only too aware that it could all have gone rather differently.
Dinner was Blumenthal's first proper restaurant venture since opening the three-Michelin starred Fat Duck in Bray in 1995, as well as his first foray into London. For a man whose molecular gastronomy inspires both bafflement and slavish devotion in equal measure and who, over the past few years, has become a regular presence on television, there was nowhere to hide. Recent history has not been particularly kind to chefs who are deemed to have become too big for their boots. In the event, he needn't have worried.
The morning after the opening, he woke in his room at the Mandarin Oriental to find that the morning's newspapers had been delivered to his door. "The headline on the Times was 'Best Restaurant in the World'." He shakes his head at the memory. "I don't think anyone could have expected that. I think it was the first time they'd ever carried a restaurant review as a news piece."
In many ways, Dinner has become a model for how to turn the opening of a restaurant into a cultural event. Blumenthal was always determined that it had to be unique and came up with the idea of serving historical British dishes given a new twist by applying modern techniques. Working alongside food historians at Hampton Court, a menu was devised including a 'ragoo' of pig's ear from 1750, tipsy cake from 1810 and the celebrated "meat fruit" – a chicken parfait with its origins in the 16th century, delicately constructed to resemble a trompe l'oeil mandarin orange.
"The idea to do historic British food came to me in 2001," Blumenthal says, mentioning his popular Feast series on Channel 4. "Then in 2004 I got a call from David Nicholls [the head of food and beverage at the Mandarin Oriental Group] asking if I wanted to do a Fat Duck in Tokyo." For various reasons, Blumenthal felt that his heart wouldn't be in it – "I've decided I'm never going to do another Fat Duck, although I probably shouldn't say that" – but he and Nicholls began discussing a space in London. Soon, Dinner was born.
Part of what appealed to Blumenthal was "being able to get involved from scratch", which meant not only complete control over the menu but the look of the room as well. After a rumoured £7m refurbishment by interior designer Adam D Tihany, who worked on Thomas Keller's Per Se in New York, the result is a clean, sleek interior with panels of leather and wood. The kitchen is a glass-walled edifice in the centre of the dining room, complete with a £300,000 cog-mechanised rotisserie custom-made by the Swiss watch company Ebel. There's also the £25,000 ice-cream trolley that works by turning a hand crank to mix liquid nitrogen with vanilla custard. "There's a slight Alice in Wonderland element to it all," says Blumenthal.
As you would expect, even more attention is paid to the food. All the dishes go through a series of rigorous checks before being served. "So with the triple-cooked chips, I'll be looking at the amount of fissures in each chip, the cracks, the colouration, as well as the obvious things like size," says Blumenthal.
But Dinner was not without teething problems: during the first week, all the kitchen tiles slid off because of the extreme heat (the temperature on the walls reached 125C). "That was a bit of an issue," says Palmer-Watts, deadpan. And it closed for a few weeks in September for "essential maintenance work".
The Dinner model is "designed to replicate" and future versions are evidently in the pipeline, although Blumenthal remains coy about where or when. "I don't know if people realise how much work goes into it," he explains. "There's this idea that we knock up a menu, then open a restaurant, but actually it's a long time in the planning. And there's a big chunk of luck involved, so that when you put the bits together it becomes more than the sum of its parts."
Clearly, a big part of Dinner's success is down to Palmer-Watts, the 34 year old from Dorset. He was head chef at the Fat Duck by the time he was 25, so Blumenthal had no qualms about putting his protégé at the helm.
"He's been absolutely 100 per cent brilliant right from day one," says Palmer-Watts of his mentor. Two weeks before we meet, Palmer-Watts's wife had given birth to their second child, a daughter, which must have added to the madness somewhat. "You might as well crack on," he says, sanguine as ever. "You get out of life what you put in."
Winning the OFM award is particularly personal for Blumenthal. His first, for the Fat Duck, came in 2004 as he was on the brink of bankruptcy and just before he won his third Michelin star. "It's got an emotional, nostalgic attachment for me," he says.
Is he aiming to win three stars for Dinner? "No, the point of Dinner is that it's a new brasserie concept. It has the refinement and precision of a three-star restaurant, in terms of the cooking, but it's designed so that if you're hungry and you want a great steak and a glass of red wine, you can eat there on a daily basis."
As they work so closely together, do the two of them ever argue? "No, not really," says Palmer-Watts.
"There might have been some arguments in the old days in the kitchen when I was less relaxed than I am now," Blumenthal interjects. "I mean, we have discussions. Very, very occasionally, I might be wr..wr…wr…"
He makes a big play of not being able to say "wrong" out loud. But then, why would he? Everything these two have done with Dinner so far seems to have been resoundingly, brilliantly right.
dinnerbyheston.com; 020 7201 3833
The best restaurant award is supported by Speyside Glenlivet.
