Burns Night at Heston's -- Guest Review by Doctor Terror
There's This Vicar, This Priest and This Rabbie (The Hind's Head, Bray, 25/1/2026)
You all know about the Vicar of Bray, right? He'd crawl to whoever was in power to hang onto his job. He was the Jacob Rees-Mogg of his time. Well, next to his church lies the empire of Heston Blumenthal, the Fat Duck Restaurant and the Hind's Head pub, where the late Prince Phillip celebrated his stag night PROPERLY after putting on a show for the press at the Dorchester Hotel. It's here that Heston invented the triple-cooked chip, the Scotch egg that's got a runny yolk and the chocolate wine Slush Puppy. Only tonight the Scotch egg's sausage meat had haggis in it.
The tasting menu at the Fat Duck, which was once four hundred quid a head but is now half that is about ten courses of the zanier stuff: the savoury ice creams (sardines on toast, bacon and egg), the roast served next to some moss on which the waiter pours boiling water so you get the smell, the tea which is hot in one side of the cup and chilled on the other, the toffees with the edible wrappers etc. By Heston's standards, the Hind's Head is generally less whacky (and a bit cheaper) than the Fat Duck next door (though prices have come down lately). The chocolate wine Slush (served with a thin slice of millionaire shortbread) is delicious but most of the Burns Night food did nod towards tradition.
Heston doesn't do things by halves. Although he wasn't there in person (in France. Foraging?), his crack team of waiters and chefs pulled off the five course menu - including a wine-gum made of Macallan malt whisky - with immaculate timing. In fact, the whisky expert from said distillery was down in full kilt, socks and sgian dubh to talk us though the increasingly mature malts we were knocking back to accompany our meal...or creative whisky cocktails if you preferred.
There was an elderly piper who took requests and I'm delighted to say that my suggestion of Andy Stewart's A Scottish Soldier was not only enthusiastically accepted but brought the house down.'So are you a restaurant critic now, then?' you may be asking. Not at all. This was as much theatre as anything you'll see in the West End.