Food: Heston’s brown Dinner, with a side order of irritation

Dinner by Heston Blumenthal, a brown cavern in the Mandarin Oriental hotel, Knightsbridge, has won a second Michelin star. These stars are food ‘Oscars’ (Hollywood has eaten everything, despite its tendency to despise food) and ensure that wealthy Americans make a detour to dine beneath the stars. This new elevation means that Blumenthal, at least technically, is Britain’s finest cook; the Meryl Streep of dripping and sweat.

Blumenthal is a historian chef, a successor to the celebrity chef; he is an intellectual. I say this not because he wears spectacles but because his website has a dictionary definition of dinner — ‘A formal evening meal, typically one in honour of a person or event — from old French Disner’. Blumenthal doesn’t cook food — he regards it, divines it, and rips it apart — and his devotees have fanned out, and spend their days designing salad in the shape of the elves of Rivendell, and vegetables in the shape of hurt. On eating a seafood dish at the Fat Duck, for instance, diners are invited to listen to the sea via iPod, an experience so synthetic I suspect it isn’t worth the trouble, and I’d get a train to Penzance and suck on a raw mackerel instead. (I hate an homage.) I wouldn’t mind Blumenthal’s molecular gastronomy so much if it didn’t remind me of both the idiocies of Paris couture and Alain de Botton. But it means that any meal at a Blumenthal joint carries almost unbearable expectations, for the diner and the food. Poor food.

If Dinner is a library of British cuisine, it looks oddly like Harveys the Furniture Store. Blumenthal may seek beauty and truth in food but he hasn’t got a clue about dining tables; the truth is, Dinner is irredeemably brown, brown as far as the eye can see, a prostrate homage to brown, in brown.