monday, october 15th, 2007

Banger Bros Portable Porkers on Portobello Road in Notting Hill (unfortunately, I did not get a picture of Chef Adria) 
The Fat Duck received an entire side of venison the day Ferran Adria stopped by The Fat Duck for lunch. When word came that the renowned chef of El Bulli, the restaurant in the Costa Brava region of Spain that knocked The Fat Duck from its number one restaurant in the world pedestal this year, Ben, a stagiere from Montana, was hacking away at the massive beast with a cleaver the size of a semi truck. Chips of bone, blood and guts were flying in a violent red frenzy, splattering the walls and floors with bits of goo and speckling our chef jackets with bloody polk a dots.

Heston and Ferran, along with Thomas Keller, Tetsuya Wakuda and several other celebrity chefs gathered in Chicago last week to celebrate Charlie Trotter's 20th Anniversary. Ashley Palmer Watts, the executive chef of The Fat Duck along with Jockey, the head pastry chef at the restaurant also attended the event. At family meal the day Ashley returned, he recounted how at the end of a long but thrilling day, Daniel Boulud appeared out of nowhere shaking a bottle of Dom Perignon, which he preceded to pop open and spray over the culinary luminaries gathered together at the end of the event. I suppose spraying a pricey bottle of bubbly at a circle of famous faces is just one of the perks of being a celebrity chef.

I'm assuming Ferran was on his way back to Spain when he made his pitstop at The Fat Duck. Adam, one of the head chefs in the prep house mentioned casually that Ferran Adria was stopping by for lunch. I instantly froze mid shallot brunoise and asked him when, hoping that it was going to be on a day when I was still working at the restaurant. After the word "today" passed from his lips it hung before me like a sparkling star that only appears when you're in love, or have been whacked over the head with a baseball bat. I couldn't believe my good fortune, but tried to suppress my giddiness when I noticed that everyone else around me maintained their cool. Adam hails from Nottingham and over our inaugural pint at The Crown a few weeks earlier he told me that his city gets a bad rap. "Everyone in England thinks we're too jolly." I liked him instantly. It was Adam who came to my rescue as I struggled to remain calm and asked if I'd like to pull together the lamb stew for Ferran's meal. Without hesitation I blurted, I'm sure too loudly and eagerly, "Yes! Yes!"  

Many of the dishes at The Fat Duck are prepared using the sous vide method of cooking in which all of the ingredients, including the protein, veg and sauce or marinade are gathered together in a plastic bag and cryovaced (or vac-packed as they call it at the restaurant). This allows for extremely slow, low cooking methods which helps the ingredients maintain their flavor integrity, hold together better and get to know each other over a long period of time. It's one of the reasons that the flavors at The Fat Duck are so intensely bright and focused.

It's also the reason that pulling together the lamb stew for Ferran only meant gathering up the ingredients including lamb's neck, lamb's tongue, veal sweetbreads, gralots (a variety of scallion) and a gorgeously thick and intensely rich lamb's sauce, the color of molasses and just as languid, filling a few bags with the items and cryovacing the bags for his meal. I didn't care. Simply to touch the sweetbreads that would soon find their way to Ferran's fork.... Did I already mention how pathetically thrilled I was that he was eating at The Fat Duck?

Once our preparations were completed, we frantically cleaned up our prep room and because of the venison slaughter earlier that morning, the job entailed a thorough salting of the butcher's block and wild scrubbing of the walls and floor to gather up the gloppy bits of blood, marrow and bone shard. We cleaned in a fury which felt a bit like our collective mother-in-law was stopping by and we feared her judgement of our home. Once the frantic clean-up was over, we scattered to find jobs that would allow us to remain in the main prep room for fear of missing him. Unfortunately, all of our effort was for naught as the illustrious chef never did find his way to the prep house, and while Ferran along with his brother Albert and a few other representatives from El Bulli dined on The Fat Duck's tasting menu, they enjoyed it from the relative calm and anonymity of The Hinds head in order to avoid a scene.

I was disappointed not to catch a glimpse of the man but still strangely and unexplainably satisfied that he had the lamb stew. I chalked the day up to neutral as I headed over to the amuse bouche station in the kitchen for the night. I work the amuse station once a week and unlike most restaurants that serve up an amuse bouche as a way to empty the pantry of food on the verge of spoiling, like everything at The Fat Duck, amuse bouche is elevated to a level without equal.

Three amuse bouche are served for the tasting menu and two for a la carte. Since most customers indulge themselves at The Fat Duck, they opt for the full tasting menu. The first offering is an oyster that is halved and served in its shell atop a ribbon of horseradish cream. The shell is perched upon a bed of sea salt made fluffy with the help of egg whites that we whip into it before service, the salt disc is garnished with a sprig of dried lavender and rests upon a thick black slate block the size of a postcard.

The oysters are from Colchester Oyster Fishery Limited in Essex. Each morning, before the fog has had a chance to lift, we run across High Street to The Hinds Head to carry the fresh oyster delivery back to the prep house where we shuck them before delivering them to the kitchen. The oysters arrive ocean fresh in small wooden crates, still wet from the sea and tangled in a bed of salty seaweed. In spite of the story my hands, that are now gouged in strange places from the oyster knife, might tell, I'm a fairly decent shucker and while I may never win a shucking contest, I'm becoming fairly adept at popping the lid and extracting the poor fellows from their snug ocean homes.

The oyster is topped with a passion fruit gelee that sets as it cools. The final preparation is a la minute and includes two single lavender buds set atop each oyster half and two lacy fragments of glucose tuile poked into each oyster half to rise above them like translucent sails.

Following the oyster is a deconstructed gazpacho comprised simply of cucumber brunoise and a quenelle of mustard ice cream. Next comes my favorite amuse; the quail. Served in a delicate half egg shaped porcelain cup resting upon a porcelain base, this amuse begins with a dice of raw turnip that is topped with a small spoonful of green sweet pea mouse. Once the mousse sets, it's topped with an amber hued quail consomme that is also given time to set. The final steps are completed a la minute. A generous spoonful of ivory colored langoustine cream is swirled atop the consomme and a quenelle of quail terrine garnished with finely minced chives, a smattering of fleur de sel, dash of fresh black pepper and a crunchy-sweet sheet of hardened fig gelee is placed upon the cream. I love the way the delicate quenelle rests deep in its white porcelain bowl, tipped gracefully to the customer at 45 degrees. It's an elegant dish that tastes even better than it looks.

Caught up in the flurry of the amuse bouche station, I barely noticed the black haired man quietly observing the kitchen. While he said not a word and was gone in a flash, I was satisfied. The giddy mood I experienced at the beginning of the day returned, but in the middle of the kitchen, where the tempo is always professional, the mood perpetually urgent and focused, I managed to maintain my cool until my long midnight walk home through the blacker than ink night that has already caused me to run into a tree and fall down an embankment into a horse field. I grinned a toothy grin that no one could see in all that deep night. It stuck to my face almost the entire way home until I remembered that the day of reckoning is coming; reservations are open now for El Bulli for 2008 and only 8000 lucky souls out of 400,000 will snag a spot. A little lamb tongue and veal sweetbread was not going to bring me a single seat closer to being counted among the chosen few. No matter. It was almost more meaningful to me to have the man at the center of it all here at The Fat Duck. Almost.