There's no business like choux business

Yesterday we went for a four-hour, 14-course lunch at The Fat Duck, Heston Blumenthal's garlanded shrine to sea salt foams, dill fluid gels and other molecular-gastronomic delights.

I'm not going to describe the whole meal until I can upload our photos, but one thing that stands out about this style of cooking was its attitude to performance. This is obvious from one perspective in Blumenthal's almost nauseating ubiquity on reality TV shows, serving prairie oysters to Cheryl Cole or teaching school dinner ladies to syringe blood orange reduction into fennel-poached chicken breasts. He's a showman, who clearly quite enjoys taking on the roles of carnival barker, conjuror and snake oil salesman.

His embrace of his own celebrity could be a bit off-putting in this age of superstar chefs, but it does seem of a piece with his approach to cooking. The appreciation of industrial cooking processes--all the gels and gums, dehydrators and aerators used to impart unexpected textures--may come direct from Ferran Adria, but there was a slightly cheesy playfulness in the meal that was all his own.

Blumenthal's reality TV appearances seem to be half in love with their own ridiculousness, and so is a style of cooking that serves sashimi washed up on an edible beach, complete with the sound of lapping waves on headphones emerging from a conch shell; or a Lewis Carroll-inspired soup made from a dissolving pocket watch; or a course of woodland flavours that starts with a smoke-flavoured film placed on the tongue and features a mat of scented oak moss belching grass-green vapour. The whole thing is of course totally over the top, but the flavours are perfect and the childish enthusiasm dares you to be so poker-arsed as to do anything other than laugh in delight.

It's great that he's taking some of the odour of sanctity out of fine dining, and those inclined to denigrate the sense of performance in this cooking should look to themselves. After all, what is the white-tablecloths school of haute cuisine if not a grand performance? Traditional restaurant culture, hatched in Napoleonic Paris, always seemed to me to be part of that era preserved into the modern day: poised between the feudal and democratic, allowing paying diners to play at being aristocrats. That controlled Bourbon gentility, where the connoisseur should acknowledge the pleasurable, but not so much as to appear carried away with emotion--where it may be permissible to laugh, but to show your teeth while doing so would appear barbaric. Over that, give me Blumenthal's evocation of childhood (petits fours served up in a sweet-shop bag, accompanied by a Parma Violets-scented menu card) any day.