Dinner by Heston Blumenthal, London
Some smart person once said that humans are ill suited for utopia. That is, we are ill suited for a steady state of contentment. Their reasoning is that, no matter how wealthy the world makes us, we always want more. A few extra dollars a year. A new shiny thing to buy or fun thing to do.
Us humans apparently have a knack of turning conveniences into necessities and luxuries into conveniences. And all of this to make way for new luxuries. In a world where the roads are paved with gold, walking down a gleaming highway of bullion feels like a right not a privilege.
Now, as someone whose wardrobe is 90% Uniqlo (the other 10% is Calvin Klein underwear, in case you were wondering), I like to think I am not all that in thrall to luxury. Underwear aside, designer clothes hold little attraction. I think of them rather like I think about fast cars, as in just a much more expensive way to do something pretty mundane.
But I am, of course, lying to you…and to myself. I like, no, love, luxury in other realms of my life. A lovely apartment. A comfy reading chair. Fruit made to taste like meat etc.
Wait, what?
Well, exactly. Until you have had fruit that tastes like meat you really haven’t tasted true luxury. And now I have. And I’m unsure if I can go back. Or even stand up straight. See, when your fruit tastes like meat, but really looks like fruit, but also really tastes like meat, you start to question the very basis of reality. You expect gravity to invert, or the sky to start raining chocolate. It makes you question yourself and everything around you on a highly existential level. Like, if fruit can taste like meat but look really like fruit, then why can’t broccoli taste like fish but look really like broccoli. And if it can, what even is broccoli? Or fish? It all starts to get pretty weird.
But before I head for the precipice, let us wind back a few hours and explain how I got here. As I’m not someone who regularly searches out things that look like one thing but taste like another, the dinner destination came as somewhat of a surprise. Which was, in fairness, intentional, as it was a surprise meal to celebrate a new job (not mine) and I was lucky enough to be along for the ride.
As we entered the very luxurious hotel within which the restaurant was situated, I noticed the doorman squirm, as he silently but not totally imperceptibly judged my choice of outfit. Had I been given time to explain, I would have said that I didn’t choose to wear Uniqlo. It was literally the only option available to me unless I wished to wear my Calvin Kleins over the top of my trousers like Superman and, in any case, doesn’t a Skoda crawl through London traffic at the same pace as a Ferrari? Less stylishly, he would likely have added haughtily, his ire rising another notch as he realized I wasn’t the hired help for the much better dressed family I accompanied to the restaurant.
On being seated at the kitchen-side table, we were presented with a choice of how much we wanted each course of our meal explained to us, from “not at all” all the way through to “War and Peace”. And, let’s be honest, when presented with a luxurious option like that, wouldn’t we all do the same? War and Peace it was. The downside was that, like War and Peace, the explanations were quite long, even when told quickly, meaning there is an awkward wait when you have to pretend not to want to immediately to eat the food that is being described to you and instead look interested and nod along whilst also wondering when you can eat the food.
In fairness, the heighted sense of anticipation and greater knowledge that comes with comprehensive explanation is actually a good thing. Although it makes you super hungry when you do get to eat. And which I think is why I made the mistake early on of asking more another piece of (delicious) bread, which came back to haunt me in the later courses.
Tasting menus like this, you see, are marathons and not sprints. Going hard out of the blocks on the bread is going to hurt you when there are four (yes, four!) deserts, one of which is a bready cake. That’s a lot of bread.
The courses were too numerous to elucidate in detail here, but they were all both ostentatious and delicious in their own way. The duck was a universal winner, but the moment that the time and space started to bend was right around when a perfectly ripe orange arrived with a(nother) slice of warm bread, and it was explained to us that this wasn’t fruit but actually meat. Just really fruity looking meat. Gloriously so.
It was a decadent exclamation point on a decadent evening, one where luxury and familiarity sat comfortably on the same plate. As we rolled ourselves into an Uber, contented, slightly overly full and generally happy, I wondered if I would be able to go back to regular fruit, or if all my fruit would henceforth have to taste like meat. I loosened my Uniqlo belt buckle a notch or two and decided that, no, sometimes luxury really isn’t for the everyday.
