The Fat Duck flies south

Restaurants open, close, and change locations every day. Usually it’s only noteworthy to the people in the local area. However, when the restaurant in question is Heston Blumenthal’s The Fat Duck, and when the move is not across town but across the globe, people pay attention.

As reported in The Guardian, the restaurant, including its staff, will travel to Melbourne this December and open in February at the five-star Crown Towers hotel. After six months, The Fat Duck will return to England, and the Melbourne venue “will be used for Dinner, to be opened under the supervision of long-time Blumenthal sidekick Ashley Palmer-Watts, who heads the London kitchen.” The move will allow renovations to proceed in the 17th-century building in Bray currently housing The Fat Duck.

Those of us in the U.S. will have to make do with Chef Blumenthal’s cookbooks, many of which grace the bookshelves of EYB members. His most recent effort, Historic Heston, was both an EYB pick for 2013 and has been nominated for a James Beard Foundation book award. Heston Blumenthal at Home is the most popular of his cookbooks amongst EYB members, and several of its recipes have been rated with five stars. If you have a favorite Blumenthal recipe or technique, we’d like to hear about it.

Photo courtesy of The Guardian