The Boy Who Loved To Eat

Mandarin Oriental Park Hotel, 66 Knightsbridge, London SW1X 7LA. Meal for two, including drinks and service: £200.

When I made the call to secure myself a spot at the renowned Knightsbridge eatery of the legendary, increasingly ubiquitous and oh so wonderfully idiosyncratic Mr Blumenthal, it was not, I must confess, my first choice of restaurant. Admittedly, it had survived a damned near eternal sentence of confinement to my bucket list, but my venturing to Dinner on this particular, apathetic nay comatose day in September proved, in actual fact, to be an entirely fortuitous blessing.

We arrive, just in time for the lunchtime rush, at the not inconspicuous Mandarin Oriental, home to the esteemed subject of this serendipitous occasion. Greeting us at the hotel door, a host of intriguing aromas wafts from the restaurant kitchen and, sure enough, like hogs to a truffle, it is not long before we sniff out our prize.

Barely have you spent ten seconds on the set before you notice something a little unorthodox about the place. All the chefs are on display. I, for one, see this as a magnificent and only too fitting nod to the unquestionably talented commis, pâtissiers and patrons who make it their mission to make this unabashedly rapacious gannet beam. Not only that, but you instantly become aware of just how understated everything is here. From the warm and comforting ivory-painted walls to the elegantly undressed oaken tables, to the mercifully unembellished descriptions of dishes on the menus: everything about the restaurant whispers sophistication.

Which, in hindsight, I realise is unsurprising. With a name as candid as Dinner, the idea behind it all seems to be to offer up a modernised reformation of simple, rustic and, foremost, British tradition, hooked out at last from underneath the watery pit of an age-old oblivion. Don’t come here looking for histrionics, because you sure as hell won’t find any. And that’s no bad thing either, for what Dinner provides is a much-needed bubble bath in which to soak your weary bones.

From the starter menu, we pounce at the opportunity to sink our claws into the restaurant’s lionised signature dish. Listed plainly if not a little unassumingly as Meat Fruit, the wonderfully simplistic name leaves almost everything to the imagination. But that’s exactly what it is: chicken liver parfait donning a shimmering, gelatinous coat of purest orange whilst ingeniously passing itself off as a mandarin. So convincing is the disguise that you can’t help feeling they’ve fobbed you off with an ordinary, unremarkable Christmas stocking filler. And a few months early, at that. In truth, though, this dish is anything but ordinary. It’s clever. Oh boy, it’s clever. It’s an intensely virtuosic violin solo played with all the nonchalance of a maestro who has known his whole life that he is, completely, unapologetically, brilliant. My knife nosedives readily into the soft, satin pâté, scooping out a portion sizeable enough to indulge its other half, a slice of toast which turns out to be, rather confusingly, a slice of toast. The sharpness of the mandarin jelly perfectly cuts through the richness of the parfait, beautifully seasoned and as worthy of its toast as any Oscar acceptance speech. It’s a real corker of a starter. In case you can’t tell, I bloody adore it.

Front-of-house was as expected for a place of this calibre. Charming, painfully well-mannered, more rehearsed than Shakespeare at the Globe, and yet totally, utterly, unemotional. Not that this textbook display of skilfully camouflaged impassivity ruined my outing by any means. Far from it. At times, though, the only thing stopping me from leaping out of my chair, scaling the table and breaking out into, what would have been, I’m sure, an excessively colourful rendition of Food, glorious food was the fact that the serving staff, quite visibly, were not having as much fun as I was. So much so, that had I in fact discovered the proverbial fly basking in my soup, I would rather have attempted to nurse the poor thing back to health than raise my hand to ask why such a floundering creature had inconveniently yet mournfully decided to overdose in my steaming bowl of bouillabaisse in the first place.

Not that they serve bouillabaisse here. And, in any case, my main course turned out to be much more sophisticated.

Chicken cooked with lettuces. Again, sounds simple, doesn’t it? It isn’t. Gliding effortlessly onto my placemat arrives a perfectly cylindrical baton of fowl aboard a spiced celeriac purée smoother than Belgian jazz, adjacent to which we have a crispy pair of chicken skin sails adorning an emerald green yacht of oyster leaves. The chicken cuts like butter having most likely been smothered in the stuff. But it tastes fabulous. It’s what every chick yearns to be when it grows up. Topping the dish off, both literally and figuratively, gems of grilled onion emulsion enrapture the tongue, adding yet another dimension to the dish you don’t realise is missing until you actually taste it. Eventually you finish the course. It pains you to see any of the celeriac purée go to waste. Put down your cutlery, pick up your plate and lick it clean. You won’t be able to resist. Lord knows I wasn’t.

And finally, for pudding, we order another venerated and stalwart classic of the restaurant, penned quite simply as Tipsy Cake. With origins dating as far back as the early nineteenth century, this dish is just about the oldest sexiest thing you can imagine. It arrives at our table, nestled comfortably in its own beautifully-crafted earthenware pot, although frankly I can’t help wondering why they didn’t just bring it to us hoisted upon a sedan chair crowning a tower of lace-trimmed panties. Somehow that would have seemed more appropriate.

Drenched in a silky smooth, luxuriously luscious vanilla custard, each heavenly mouthful of this intoxicating and buxom brioche sends me into a blissful reverie. Which is surprising, as anyone who knows me well knows that I detest vanilla custard. And brioche. Waiting in the wings, we have a perfectly sweetened slab of spit-roast pineapple, exquisitely masquerading as a gloriously golden bar of bullion and screaming out to be scoffed. As a whole, it’s the kind of dish where all asceticism flies out the window. Willingly. The sort of pud you know does absolutely no favours for your waistline, but you just don’t care. I mean, we’re all going to die someday, right? If ever there were a classy way to go out on a high, I guarantee you this would be it. All puritans are therefore advised to avert their gaze on scanning the dessert menu here, if only so that we shameless and sinful mortals can lay claim to this voluptuous showstopper of a dish before they have time to come to their senses and realise the joys on which they have missed out.

The prices at Dinner are more than fair. A touch expensive, perhaps, if and when booze decides to make an appearance at the party, but fair all the same. Then again, this isn’t really the sort of place you come to hoping to leave sloshed and merry. You come to be wooed at the balcony; maybe, even, to be coaxed into eloping with your sweetheart. You come to be awed by the spellbinding performance which has just been put on in your very honour. You would, in short, have to be a vacant, expressionless dullard not to leave here toe-tappingly giddy at the spectacle you have just been fortunate enough to witness.