30-03-2014
Total light at Dinner by Heston, inside the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Knightsbridge, London, tel. +44.(0)20.72352000. Reserving a table at Heston Blumenthal’s restaurant in London is not so prohibitive, last minute is possible
In London’s increasingly boring and decadent restaurant-in-palace-hotels scene, Dinner by Heston proves to be original and glorious. There are many details that make this establishment a unique place and the experience a joyful one. First of all, an important detail: reserving a table is very simple and there are always some last minute tables available, a hardly trivial fact.
The architecture and the spaces inside the restaurant are used in an excellent way. It’s useless to hide the fact that Dinner is a restaurant to be enjoyed at daytime, in which to spend the hours around lunch immersed in the light while sinking into very comfortable chairs. Dinner’s windows open up the eyes: on one side, there’s the magnificent kitchen, with its dynamics as precise as a Swiss clock during service hours. There’s a theatrical fetishism when looking at the carved pineapples roasting on the spit, suspended with a pulley and rocking while their sugar and juices fall on a steel plate. Or again when looking at the transparent porcelain lights in the shape of a baking tin.
“Historic Heston”, ed. Bloomsbury, 2013
Heston Blumenthal’s project proves how wide the scope of his research is. His latest book “Historic Heston” (published by Bloomsbury, 112 GBP), one of the most beautiful books to be out in 2013, is dedicated precisely to the historic research he conducted for Dinner. This is how French style menus, signed by the usual people, are abandoned. The superabundance of details and refinements perfectly answer the question regarding what is luxury in the restaurant of a great hotel in 2014 and makes of Dinner one of the places not to be missed when in London.
Ashley-Palmer Watts, chef at Dinner and historic right-arm of Heston Blumenthal (photo by Sergio Coimbra)
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A media professional divided between Paris, London and Tokyo. He writes about restaurants as an excuse to speak about many more things