Dinner by Heston Blumenthal

Dinner by Heston opened in the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Knightsbridge in January 2011, gaining a Michelin star within a year and a second in 2014. The head chef since May 2023 has been Adam Tooby-Desmond, who has been working here since 2017, starting as a demi chef de partie before working his way up to head chef; he previously worked at the excellent Alimentum. The dining room here is large, seating 110 guests, and there is also a private dining room for up to 12 guests. The tasting menu was £160, which is what we opted for, or you could choose a la carte instead. To give an idea of prices, the meat fruit on the a la carte was £26, the lobster kedgeree £38 and the beef £64.

The wine list stretched over 67 pages. It had 755 labels and ranged in price from £45 to £12,500, with a median price of £270 and an average markup to retail price of 3.9 times, which extremely high, especially if you think about the cash margins on a list with such a high median bottle price. Sample references were Moschofilero Amalia Brut Ktima Tselepos Mantinia NV at £75 for a bottle that you can find in the high street for £16, Chardonnay Camina Bodegas Cristo de la Vega 2022 at £59 compared to its retail price of £6, and Esprit de Pavie (the third wine of Château Pavie) 2019 at £95 for a wine that will set you back £26 in the high street. For those with the means there was Pingus 2001 at £1,450 compared to its retail price of £972, and Clos Rougeard Saumur Champigny Le Bourg 2017 at £1,550 for a wine whose current market value is £419. This is long but outrageously priced list, with one wine at 14 times its retail price. To give an example of a wine that I drink regularly, the Rioja Alta 904 vintage 2015 was priced here at £540, yet can be bought in the UK for £74. This is 7.3 times its retail price, and in fact is worse than that since you have to add service to that price. This kind of markup level is simply inexcusable, in my view. Wine pairings were available at £135, £195, £659 or £950.

Bread was from Paul Rhodes Bakery in Greenwich. The sourdough was made from a mix of Grano Arso (Puglian) flour and Manitoba Canadian flour. Despite the credentials of the bakery, sourdough should ideally be a lot airier than this one, and although the crust was fine this bread was just a little too dense to my taste. The butter was nice, from organic pasteurised milk from Guernsey cows raised at Berkeley dairy farm in Swindon.

There were no conventional canapés served, but instead a vodka lime sour was made tableside. This Fat Duck dish has meringue flavoured with citrus briefly dipped in liquid nitrogen and dusted with match tea powder. This fragile concoction needs to be eaten immediately, popped in one piece into your mouth. When the meringue collapses on your tongue there is the refreshing citrus flavour as a palate cleanser (15/20). Hay-smoked Loch Duart salmon with gentleman’s relish (garlic and anchovy emulsion) and sorrel with pickled lemon dressing was pleasant enough, but I have eaten much better smoked salmon than this, and in such a simple dish the salmon needed to really stand out (barely 14/20). 

Meat fruit is an almost iconic Heston invention, and a clever one.  Chicken liver parfait is disguised as a mandarin orange, served with grilled toast that is brushed with olive oil that was infused with garlic, thyme and rosemary.  The liver parfait was silky in texture and deeply flavoured, the acidity from the wrapping of mandarin jelly layer balancing the richness of the liver. The parfait is made from chicken livers, shallots, garlic, thyme, a little foie gras, Madeira, port, brandy eggs and butter, prepared in several stages, and the jelly has just a hint of paprika. The overall effect is pretty, clever and above all tastes lovely (18/20).

Salmagundy was a salad of confit chicken thighs, bone marrow warmed in chicken roasting juices, horseradish cream, braised salsify and bitter chicory leaves with a walnut vinaigrette. The word itself is derived from a 16th century French word salmagundis and in this context means a salad of disparate elements. The bitter leaves worked well and the hint of horseradish lifted the chicken flavour, though ultimately this is just a pleasant salad (15/20).

Lobster kedgeree sounded intriguing. It used basmati rice, golden trout roe and curry oil. The lobster was tender enough but the dish was otherwise just some rice with curry oil, and lacked interest for me. A traditional kedgeree has smoked haddock with curry, parsley and cardamon, with the spices complementing the smoky fish. This combination of lobster and curry oil did not work as well in my view, and was certainly not a kedgeree as I would know it. It is fine to reinvent classic dishes, but if you are doing so the idea is to improve on them, and I would rather have just eaten a traditional kedgeree (13/20).

Main course was fillet of Hereford beef (from Aubrey Allen butchers in Coventry) served with Heston’s signature triple cooked chips and a meat jus sauce. The meat aged for 21 days and was fine though fillet rarely has a great deal of flavour. The issue was that the sauce was not quite hit and the puree next to the beef was completely cold. This was a pity (14/20). Alongside were Heston’s invention of triple cooked chips, and these, made from Agria potatoes, were great. 

Tipsy cake is the signature dessert here. It consists of a skewer of slowly cooked spit-roast pineapples, served alongside a freshly made brioche that was rolled in clarified butter, covered in caster sugar and then left to prove for four hours. Each tipsy cake is baked to order and bathed in vanilla, Sauternes and brandy custard. The sharpness of the fruit is an ideal companion for the rich sponge cake. This is a superb dessert, original and thoroughly enjoyable (18/20).

A sort of deconstructed Blackberry tart was nice enough. Saffron and almond sponge was coated in blackberry gel, along with Arlette pastry (caramelised puff pastry) topped with pickled blackberries and meadowsweet ice cream. This was perfectly enjoyable, but the top pastry sections in France won’t be too nervous of this as competition (15/20 tops). The final dessert was ice cream made with liquid nitrogen, prepared tableside. The ice cream was hand churned and scooped into a cornet of brik pastry with a little salt, and a choice of toppings. This was a nice way to finish the meal and a clever piece of culinary theatre (16/20).

Coffee was from Workshop Coffee in Fitzrovia and was quite good. Service was good this evening, with our Irish waitress Isabella being great, and the sommelier being very engaging. An unusual feature was that you could indicate, via a card that you place in a wooden slot, what level of interaction you wanted with the waiting staff. This ran from effectively no interaction at all other than delivering the plates, through to detailed descriptions of the dishes and the background to each. The bill came to £471 per person, albeit with a couple of bottles of nice wine. If you shared a modest bottle between two then you would still struggle to leave with a bill less than about £220 each once you account for water, coffee and service. This seems to me a lot of money for what appears on the plate, especially in a meal bereft of luxury ingredients.  It is one thing to pay a lot of money for a meal with langoustines, turbot, scallops, truffles and caviar, where there is clearly a high ingredient cost. The meal tonight mostly involved farmed salmon, chicken livers, salad leaves, beef fillet and pineapple, none of which cost a fortune. There were two really stand out dishes, the meat fruit and the tipsy cake, but nothing else was remotely in that league. The elaborate and theatrical service is doing a lot of heavy lifting here to distract from this inconsistency in the cooking.

Further reviews: 26th Feb 2015 | 03rd Mar 2011