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A. I was in the city to take the measure of a few new restaurants from established names in the British dining scene, restaurants that are helping London make its mark on the world’s map of Places Where It Is Good to Eat.
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B. Mr. Blumenthal is the bald and aggressively spectacled chef and proprietor of the Fat Duck, a restaurant to the west of London. The Fat Duck is widely considered one of the world’s finest cathedrals to modernist cuisine, the sort of restaurant where a meal could start with nitro-poached aperitifs, finish with “the smell of the Black Forest” and take four hours in between.
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C. THE pretty things of Knightsbridge were capering around Hyde Park in the sun, as white-haired old sailors made their way into the Royal Thames Yacht Club to nap. It was midafternoon in Belgravia, time for lunch.
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D. So even after calling for a reservation more than six weeks ahead, all that was available for Dinner this day was at 2:30 p.m. Still there was a crowd at the door, and a few minutes’ wait for a table. Dinner is a hot scene.
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E. Heston Blumenthal’s restaurant in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, just down the road from Buckingham Palace, was chief among them. The restaurant, called Dinner, opened at the end of January to largely rave reviews in the prickly British press.
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F. The rush for them rivals the one for orchestra seats for the new West End production of “Much Ado About Nothing,” with a cast led by the television stars Catherine Tate and David Tennant, or for a private tour of the “Pioneers of the Downtown Scene” show at the Barbican, which danced to an end on Sunday.
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G. They do not always succeed: the restaurant’s heavy chandeliers were modeled on the rose window of Westminster Abbey, where Prince William made Kate Middleton his bride. In Britain, class will always be important.
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H. There are no cloths on the tables. The ivory-painted walls do not feature paintings but porcelain wall sconces in the shape of old molds. A glass-walled kitchen, towering ceilings and magnificent views of Hyde Park try to offer the restaurant a sense of openness and accessibility.
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I. Dinner, in contrast, is a more casual if still quite expensive venture, closer to the city’s heart. It is less a cathedral than a well-appointed prayer chapel.
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J. Reservations at Dinner, which is devoted to modern takes on historical British recipes, are in any event among the hottest tickets in town. (A meal for two costs in the neighborhood of $200.)
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