Dinner by Heston at Crown is Melbourne’s best restaurant experience, says Dan Stock
HIS Fat Duck pop-up got the world talking, now Dinner by Heston Blumenthal has taken its place at Crown. But does it live up to the hype?
Melbourne
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IT is, apparently, the most Instagrammed dish on the planet, created by its most famous chef.
But just as the Meat Fruit is more than social media-driven hysteri-hype, Heston Blumenthal is more than just a chef with a firm grasp on the fantastical.
Because it’s easy to forget that underneath all the nitro-charged trickery and giant lollipops and lickable wallpaper and opening the First Restaurant on Mars (OK, I made that one up) is a chef who obsessively creates food that’s all about flavour.
Powerful, eye-rollingly delicious food that definitively, consistently answers the question: does this taste as good as it could?
So while the Fat Duck pop-up was the headline-grabber, it’s the permanent Dinner by Heston Blumenthal that’s the real win for Melbourne.
Because where the Fat Duck was a one-in-a-lifetime multi-sensory extravaganza for but a few, Dinner is a more traditional restaurant experience, right down to the entree-main-dessert choices, accessible for those who choose as often as they like.
While that menu is based on historical British gastronomy, it is some of the most cleverly modern, accomplished cooking you’ll find anywhere.
Sure, his name might be on the door but this is very much a dual effort, with Ashley Palmer-Watts the man overseeing the army of chefs, both here and in the London original and is responsible for executing a menu of 30-odd dishes to two Michelin star standard.
You’ll see a flurry of white-jacketed activity in the glassed in kitchen that is as much of a dynamically engaging view as the twinkling cityscape and river that the floor-to-ceiling windows make a justifiably proud point of.
It’s a magnificent room, with leather booths and green velour chairs around spacious tables with two huge still life photographs behind gold chain mail curtains subtle nods to theme.
Everywhere you look, staff, with waistcoated waiters as numerous as the chefs. They are excellent; calm, clued on, with a welcome splash of cheekiness to soften the fastidious adherence to perfectly executed service, where no crumb goes unwiped, no glass unfilled, no question unanswered. It is a joy to be looked after so well.
As it is to be freed from the degustation and eat this food, the relative simplicity of dishes belying the technique behind them.
The frumenty, for instance, is a multistage dish of technical complexity, yet is more simply enjoyed as a riot of textures, with grilled WA octopus tentacles swimming in a smoky, umami-rich broth that tastes of the sweet sea, with puffed rice, and samphire and little dots of chervil adding vegetal notes ($36).
Even better, the simple-sounding 14th century-based Rice & Flesh is a bowl of such sublime comfort I wanted to lick it clean. In a wet, lurid sunshiny saffron risotto little deep red pools held nuggets of curry-spiced kangaroo.
With a dark, delicious yeastiness to this flesh, the rice with a proper nutty al dente bite within its sharp creamy sauce, it reminded me of Vegemite cheese toast, albeit made by Dionysus after the other gods went back to his. Just wow ($36).
I love the use of surprising, challenging, ingredients with offal turning up, whether crunchy soft sweetbreads with pink lamb ($56) that’s served with seared cucumber and minty peas (it’s like summer and Sunday roast rolled into one), or duck hearts with perfectly seared pink breast slices.
The crouton-topped hearts — or umbels (as in ‘umbel pie, m’lord) — added a hit of iron to the rich meat, charred artichoke adding a bitter, tender touch ($54).
The Lamington cake to finish is a nod to Dinner’s new home, a raspberry centre oozing down the coconut-covered, white choc mousse cake, with vanilla rum ice cream satisfyingly boozy ($25).
Yes, it’s expensive, but it’s food of unparalleled quality in a space equally suited to special occasion as it is for multiple return visits and you surprisingly won’t be stung on wine. Sure, there are $5000 Burgundian heroes but you can equally sip on a delightful $32 bottle of D’Arenberg.
It’s a more thoughtfully constructed list at all price points than you’ll find at most restaurants at this level, and cocktails, designed by UK bar tsar Tony Conigliaro, are equally clever, whether an olive leaf martini, or a clear Bloody Mary ($24).
And the meat fruit? Even if I said it was rubbish you’d still order it, but of course it’s not.
It’s as flawless as the rest, a statiny parfait that properly tastes of liver under a skin of mandarin gel that has an almost green fruit sharpness to its citrus kick, all the better to cut through the richness.
Two triangles of excellent buttered toast complete the picture that for all the world looks like a mandarin ($38). Sure, it’s a trick, but it’s the tastiest trick in the book.
Heston famously went off In Search of Perfection for TV.
Even better than the original, I think his second Dinner is as close as a restaurant gets.
THE SCORE
19/20
Highlight: A flawless experience
Lowlight: Credit card surcharge. Really Crown?
Lvl 3 Crown Towers, Southbank
9292 5777
Open Dinner nightly from 5.30pm; lunch Fri.-Sat from noon
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