Heston Blumenthal to open London restaurant

The experimental chef plans eaterie at the Mandarin Oriental hotel

The experimental chef Heston Blumenthal is to open a new restaurant in central London at a luxury hotel.

Blumenthal, who holds three Michelin stars with his Fat Duck restaurant and the Hinds Head pub in Bray, Berkshire, plans to open his first restaurant in the capital at the Mandarin Oriental, near Hyde Park.

The restaurant, due to open next autumn and Blumenthal’s first outside the village of Bray, will feature ‘the chef's inimitable style of culinary alchemy with a menu heavily influenced by his ongoing research and discovery of historic British gastronomy’, a spokesperson said.

Blumenthal has won international acclaim with his brand of ‘molecular gastronomy’ and has delighted and baffled guests with concoctions such as snail porridge and sardine-on-toast sorbet since he opened the Fat Duck in 1995.

His decision to open a restaurant in the capital comes after the Fat Duck had to close its doors for two weeks at the start of the year after a food scare which left several members of staff and diners with a vomiting bug.

The Health Protection Agency (HPA) later confirmed that staff infected with the norovirus bug had worked at the award-winning restaurant, and categorically ruled out food poisoning as a possible cause.

The new restaurant will seat 140 guests, will be open for lunch, dinner and afternoon tea and will be headed by Ashley Palmer Watts, Blumenthal's group executive chef at The Fat Duck for the last nine years.

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