Dinner by Heston

Heston Blumenthal has long been a point of interest for Mr and I. We love the concept of molecular gastronomy, and of the science behind food. Of course our bucket list includes eating at at least one of his restaurants! As the Fat Duck is currently back home in Aus, we decided to try out Dinner by Heston, and what better occasion than for our anniversary! We were spending the night at Hotel 41, but decided a meal at Dinner was a necessity for our celebratory weekend.

The dishes served here are inspired by and based on recipes that were popular between 1500-1940. It makes the menu a little intimidating, but one would expect nothing lesson from Heston.

We arrived at Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park and found our way inside to the restaurant. We were led to our window-side table and were offered the food and wine menus. It was a little hard to hear the waiter due to the noise in the restaurant, and a little hard to understand his strong accent, but the atmosphere was happy and relaxed so we did our best to understand each other.

We decided to start our culinary journey with the signature dish, Meat Fruit. This glorious concoction takes three days to make, and consists of chicken liver parfait inside mandarin gel, served with grilled bread. It is probably one of the tastiest savoury things I've ever eaten, even if it was a bit hard to convince your brain that it wasn't actually a mandarin to begin with.

We followed this with a different steak each from the menu. Steak in London is not really the best, so we were excited to have one that promised to be very good. And very good they were! So good, in fact, that we ate them without a thought to a photo. The accompanying chips and mushroom ketchup were equally delicious. Ketchup, as we discovered on the information slip included with our cutlery, was traditionally made from things like mushrooms, seafood, pickles etc. It was designed as a sweet and sour sauce, and only recently was converted to the tomato-based sauce we expect today.

For dessert I chose the Chocolate Bar - a chocolate mousse-like bar filled with passion fruit jam, with a side of ginger ice-cream and crushed biscuit. The flavours on their own were a little overwhelming, but somehow combined together made a perfect, delicious mouthful.

Mr went with the Beekeeper's Chocolate, after seeing another table receive it. This was a malt and honey cake with toasted barley mousse, and chocolate and ale ice-cream. Again, each flavour was strange on its own, but combined they were absolutely beautiful.

To end this exciting adventure of new and unusual flavours, we were surprised with an Earl Grey infused chocolate ganache, complete with a delightfully crumbly shortbread and lovely chocolate message.

Having experienced the perhaps more usual food of this restaurant, we are more keen than ever for the Fat Duck to return to London so we can expand our Heston culinary exploration!