friday, october 5th, 2007 

An oak tree palette cleanser.
The Fat Duck is divided into three components, housed in two different buildings. There's the restaurant that is small enough to stuff into a back pocket, with only fifteen tables and forty seven seats. The decor is minimal with a long abstract oil painting of trees in amber and lime on either side of the whitewashed room. The same honey amber hue is shared by the elegant swirl of calla lilies slinking their way though three clear glass bowls stacked on a small table near the entrance. Dividing the former Tudor pub that still bares its exposed heavy oak beams is an open fireplace that now houses an iron sculpture instead of the fire that I presumed blazed here throughout the centuries. The linen is starched white and ironed before being set with a spare table dressing of a candle and a grapefruit size bowl sheltering a single flower.

Tucked behind the dining area is the tiny kitchen reached by a walk through that leads to a large back garden where family meal is shared outside by the entire staff who sit elbow to elbow in their navy and white striped aprons along a long row of wooden picnic tables beneath a canopy of holly and oak trees. The freezers, supplies, aprons and other necessities are stored in a row of numbered, wooden sheds across form the picnic tables and while I know they are supposed to evoke a farmhouse feel, to me they are far too similar to the outhouse we used to use as children at my grandparent's cabin to inspire a sense of rustic romanticism. 

A few have commented that they've never seen a kitchen so small but I would beg to differ. In New York, I've several kitchens with a great deal less space and what they lack in space they make up for in dirt and grime. Lunch and dinner are both served from the kitchen but the two other components of The Fat Duck is where most of the action takes place. Across from High Street, where the restaurant is located, is a gently curving path that leads to a whitewashed building housing the restaurant's prep area where the bulk of work is done.

Upstairs form this row of rooms is "The Lab". It's a mysterious place with the usual components of a kitchen; ovens, sinks, walk-ins, but it's also filled with rows of gleaming beakers, test tubes, pipes and other random gadgets that look like they would be more at home in a mad scientist's laboratory than a restaurant. This room is what's behind the curtain of The Fat Duck. It's where the culinary wiz-kids play with their toys of liquid nitrogen and neoprene. It's where incidents happen that inspire proclamations like this from one of the research assistants at the pub after our shift, "I feel so sick. I was poisoned by a goose today, some chemical we added to it didn't sit right with me." Only a few people work in the lab and it's where Heston Blumenthal spends most of his time. I have yet to see him but I'm keeping my eyes open for the wizard doing his thing behind the curtain upstairs.

The lane from the restaurant to the prep house and lab.
The majority of cooks who work at The Fat Duck spend most of their time in the prep room below the lab but thankfully, most of the prep work does not involve the drudgery of producing endless amounts of random dices like it does in so many restaurants. In this experimental gastronomic wonderland of a place that never stops hopping, you're blowing out the interiors of eggs for bacon and egg ice cream one minute (more on that in a later entry) to cleaning thousands of snails for the snail porridge delivered a few minutes ago from the snail farmer who plucked them from the earth that morning. Every time I turn around I'm learning something brilliant, something surreal, something that inspires a moment of epiphany. This staff is at the top of their game and they never stop thinking about new ways to transform something familiar into something gloriously new and exciting.

Tasting everything is another perk of the job. At the restaurant I was previously at, we never sampled anything and I always wondered whether something tasted as it should. At The Fat Duck, I am presented with something exquisite at every turn. Parsnip panna cotta one minute, mustard ice cream the next. Crispy fried quail strips at one station, ultraviolet green snail butter at the next. It's a thrilling place to be because everything tastes novel and contemporary yet it is all produced (or most of it, that is) from elements that are familiar and basic.

The Fat Duck is renowned for its innovative food but what I am most impressed by is that the building blocks inspiring the thrilled gasps in the dining room are comprised of elements that are fresh, familiar and in most cases, sourced locally from farmers and purveyors who deliver it to the door covered in mud from the fields where they caught it or harvested it that morning.

A few nights ago was no exception. After family meal, we arrived to find crates overflowing with dozens of pigeons. They were dead certainly but they arrived fully intact; feathers, head and feet. We spent the next few hours in what can only be described as a pigeon massacre. Plucking, butchering and finally gutting our poor winged friends who spent a happy life (up until the moment when I ripped their little guts out) roaming around on an organic pigeon farm where they were fed organic porridge until they achieved just the right point of plumpness.

Poached Breast of Anjou Pigeon Pancetta: Photo Credit Jason Purcell
Ripping the feathers, butts and guts out of dozens of pigeons initially made me feel a bit squeamish. I suppose the roasted chicken we had for dinner didn't help. But soon the entire kitchen found its groove and the jokes flew as we plucked, squeezed and chopped our way to a bloody mess. We were saving the hearts from our mangled birds and they therefore had to be removed delicately and with a bit of heart extraction finesse. I started to enjoy this morbid little butchering party we were having and I suppose then that I deserved it when the pigeon reminded me that while he might be dead he should still be respected. I grabbed his tiny, wine red heart with a bit too much force and when I tugged at the organ, it burst, blood flying from the pigeon's now non-existent read end into my face. There's nothing like a shot of pigeon heart blood in the eye to remind you that even though you might be the cook, when it comes down to it, you would be nothing without the food.