http://www.thefatduckgroup.com/

The Heston Blumenthal Team, HIgh Street, Windsor (2026)

09/06/2026

What I love about ice cream is that there’s so much around it to enjoy. It’s nostalgic, playful, and it teaches you about science and history all at once.

There are countless ways to approach it, and it offers an wonderful patform for creativity. That’s why ice cream has appeared in so many forms across my restaurant menus and television shows over the years.

One of those shows was Heston's Fantastical Food, which included the Sky High 99 episode, where I revisited the wonder and excitement of childhood food memories and flavours by supersizing all kinds of treats on a monumental scale.

Ice cream also starred in Heston's Feasts and Kitchen Chemistry, which explored the science behind cooking and the fascinating processes that shape flavour, texture, and our experience of food.

Kitchen Chemistry, Ice Cream episode https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WbVXb3_ZjU&t=2s
Heston's Fantastical Feast, The Sky 99 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeWsoZSEIfg

05/06/2026

I was crazy about ice cream as a kid. It has a powerful hold on my memory because every Sunday my sister and I would be dragged to Church Street Market near Marylebone by our grandmother. Although it was only the early 1970s, it now feels like another age. Among the stalls of bric-à-brac there were even rag-and-bone men selling things from horse and carts.

In return for trudging around the market, we were allowed to choose an ice cream from the Regent Snack Bar on Edgware Road.

It was run by a Sicilian family and had a wonderfully 1950s feel to it, with a gigantic plastic cone hanging above the front door and a little serving hatch opening onto the street. A man in a white coat, with the deadpan demeanour of a Mafia capo, would scoop and smooth the ice cream into cones using a traditional trowel-like metal spoon.

It tasted fantastic — partly because of the anticipation, the delayed gratification. Those factors are such an important part of our enjoyment of food. I saw the ice cream as a reward for the punishment of being dragged around the market, and that sense of reward gave it a special place in my memory. In fact, the whole idea of food and reward has underpinned many of the ways the restaurant has evolved over the years.

That ice-cream experience stayed with me and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it was one of the first things I wanted to perfect and serve at The Fat Duck. Ice cream was the first food I investigated in the kind of depth that later became second nature at the restaurant, which is one reason it has remained such a focus of creativity on the menu.

30/05/2026

Of all the senses, hearing may be the one to which we pay least attention when we eat. But it can completely change what we experience as we eat.

I first realised this when I was asked to chew a piece of chewing gum while listening to the sound of something crunchy through headphones. Even though I knew the gum was soft, my brain was convinced I was eating something brittle.

Later, working with the scientists, I discovered that changing the sounds around food can, for example make crisps seem crisper, carrots seem crunchier or even make identical dishes taste different.

For this, we fed people two slices of the same oyster. The first while listening to the sound of the sea, the second while listening to the sounds of a farmyard. The oyster eaten accompanied by sea-sounds was found to be fresher, saltier and more delicious.

That experiment was one of the catalysts for The Fat Duck’s first multisensory dish, Sound of the Sea.

27/05/2026

I have some incredible news to share. 'Heston: My Life with Bipolar' has been longlisted for a National Television Award in the Best Authored Documentary category.

Making this film was about honesty, hope, and starting a conversation and I'm so proud of this film and of the conversations it has helped open up. I couldn't have done it without the support of the wonderful people at , whose work to support those living with bipolar disorder is truly life-changing.

The response from so many of you has already moved me beyond words. And if the film meant something to you, please take a moment to vote and share the link. The NTAs are decided entirely by public vote and every vote counts.

https://bit.ly/3umnX6N

And if you haven't seen the documentary yet, it's available to watch now on BBC iPlayer.

https://bbc.in/4fbGpKv

25/05/2026

I’ve spent years thinking about the relationship between sound and food. One of the things that fascinates me is how much what we hear can influence what we experience as we eat. The sound of the sea can make an oyster seem fresher. Crunching noises can make food feel crisper. Music can even make something taste sweeter or more bitter.

That is part of the inspiration for Sound of the Sea. By taking a multisensory approach that includes sound, I created a dish that goes beyond flavour to create a memory, a feeling and a sense of place. Because food that engages all of the senses can have an exceptionally powerful emotional effect.

24/05/2026

One of the things I loved most about opening the first Dinner by Heston Blumenthal was being able to disappear down the rabbit hole of British culinary history, exploring everything from medieval feasts and Tudor banquets to Georgian, Regency and Victorian dining.

It gave me and my team the chance to create a menu that brings those (hi)stories back to life through dishes like Meat Fruit, Ragoo of Pigs’ Ears and Tipsy Cake. But I also wanted the restaurant itself to be filled with small nods to that history.

So in the main dining room, you might spot custom-made porcelain wall sconces shaped like antique Victorian jelly moulds.

20/05/2026

There is something endlessly fascinating about leafing through old British recipes and realising just how bold and inventive they were.

Dishes that are centuries old can still feel completely surprising today. Meat disguised as fruit. Quaking puddings. Rich suet creations. Roast meats paired with spice, smoke and unexpected sweetness. At Dinner, we have always loved exploring these forgotten ideas and bringing them back to life in new ways.

If you are curious to dive into historic cookbooks, I would recommend The Accomplisht Cook by Robert May from 1660. It is full of theatrical dishes, unexpected flavour combinations and ideas that still feel surprisingly modern today. (One of the biggest hits at the Hind’s Head, Quaking Pudding, was inspired by a recipe from this book.) Reading it, you realise that many ideas we think of as cutting-edge were already being explored centuries ago.

17/05/2026

While the original recipe from The Fat Duck uses more ingredients and involves several extra stages, this is a simpler, more home-friendly version.

The edible wrappers are not difficult to make, but you will need plenty of clean 9cm Petri dishes, (which even I realise are not staples of many domestic kitchens, but they are inexpensive and easy to buy online). You also need powdered gelatine rather than sheets (which you may also have to obtain online), as it is much easier to measure the exact
amount required.

You can, of course, make the caramels without the wrappers, but they add something special and everyone loves the idea that you can eat the whole thing.

This recipe makes more wrappers than you need, but because it uses just a single drop of glycerine, it is not really possible to make a smaller batch.

14/05/2026

In the early 2000s, I had been experimenting with savoury chewy sweets inspired by Starburst (Opal Fruits), making flavours such as lamb and pumpkin. But often you have to step outside the kitchen to find inspiration.

So when I visited Alan Parker at Firmenich, my eye was caught by an incredibly thin edible film and I started picturing packaging you could eat: a sweet wrapper, a soup packet, even a bottle.

Back in the kitchen, I first tried making an edible drinks bottle. It looked and snapped like plastic, but there was one problem: if you bit into it the wrong way, it was sharp enough to cut your mouth. So I moved on to something different:an edible wrapper around a
chewy sweet.

The wrapper had to dissolve in your mouth, so the sweet inside needed to create plenty of saliva. I experimented with highly acidic flavours. Tamarind was far too sour, but tomato, violet and even black pudding worked surprisingly well. The best version of all was apple pie.

It became the Apple Pie Caramel, served at The Fat Duck in an edible wrapper printed with the words “Eat All of Me”.

11/05/2026

When I was eighteen, I wrote to around twenty of the best restaurants I could find, asking for an apprenticeship. Only one replied: Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons, run by Raymond Blanc, who offered me a week’s probation.

On my first day, I was led to a huge mountain of green beans and told to top and tail them. When I finished, there was another pile waiting. Then came more repetitive jobs: chopping vegetables, peeling potatoes and shallots, scraping leeks and cleaning fish. I had imagined that I would be thrown straight into every part of the kitchen, but instead I discovered that a young apprentice spends a very long time learning the basics, one task at a time.

At the end of the week I was offered a job, but I turned it down. I wanted to learn in my own way, to understand every detail and move faster than the traditional kitchen system allowed. So when I opened The Fat Duck in 1995, my formal training consisted of just one week, and most of that week was spent with green beans.

The Heston Blumenthal Team

09/06/2026

05/06/2026

30/05/2026

27/05/2026

25/05/2026

24/05/2026

20/05/2026

17/05/2026

14/05/2026

11/05/2026

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