| Abstrakt: |
Beston Blumenthal is one of the most forward-thinking chefs in the world. But his new restaurant, Dinner by Heston Blumenthal, is firmly rooted in the past -- circa 1558. The London restaurant, which opens next month in the Mandarin Oriental overlooking Hyde Park, will champion British food from Tudor times up through that 20th-century invention, the ploughman's lunch. ''I was fascinated because I thought I knew quite a lot about cooking, and here I was, finding things I never knew existed,'' he said of his extensive historical research. ''There's a sense of pride of introducing this stuff to people today.'' While Blumenthal won't be sending out four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie -- a dish he replicated in his recent book, ''Heston's Fantastical Feasts,'' using a cement mixer to make the pastry -- or sewing the back half of one animal to the front half of another, he will be offering, say, spit-roasted rib of beef with triple-cooked chips and mushroom ketchup from the 1800s. ''That's a simple one,'' he said. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
