Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck closes over food poisoning scare
Source of Article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/foodanddrinknews/4863948/Heston-Blumenthals-Fat-Duck-closes-over-food-poisoning-scare.html The Fat Duck, the Michelin-starred
restaurant run by renowned chef Heston Blumenthal,
has closed as a result of a food poisoning scare.
By Anita
Singh, Showbusiness Editor Dozens of
customers have reported feeling unwell after eating at the establishment in
Bray, The Fat Duck
was crowned "the best place to eat on earth" by Restaurant magazine
in 2005 and is currently second only to Initial tests
conducted by environmental health officers and Blumenthal's own food safety
consultants have come back negative, but the chef has closed the restaurant
temporarily as a precaution. Reservations for the coming days have been
cancelled. The
restaurant closed on Tuesday and no date has been set for its reopening,
although Blumenthal said he was hopeful that the situation would be resolved
next week. He said: "I was in "After
14 years of work, to come to the point where you have to close the restaurant
is upsetting. The Fat Duck for me is very much a labour
of love. We have 40-odd chefs for 40 customers. All that we try to do is give
the best possible experience to our customers and we don't want anyone to
feel remotely uncomfortable, let alone unwell. We put so much time and effort
and work into providing the best quality we can. But I don't know what else
to do but close the restaurant." Diners who
had visited the restaurant began falling in two or three weeks ago. Between
30 and 40 people have been affected. The source of
their symptoms remains a mystery, as the Fat Duck's kitchens are among the
most rigorously monitored in the country. Blumenthal said: "The samples
have all come back negative. It's very strange. Four or five years ago we
enlisted the help of a hygiene consulting company and we routinely send
samples off for analysis, as we know there can be all sorts of pitfalls in
the supply chain. All our systems are checked and monitored. We have done
everything in our power and I've never come across anything like this before. "We
called in the environmental health officers and they said it could be a
non-specific virus which is going around. But all our staff have been tested and nothing has shown up. We have even
logged the table numbers and the members of staff who served those tables,
and there is no correlation. The environmental health officers have been very
supportive, although obviously they are concerned." The closure
will prove costly for Blumenthal, but he insisted: "It's very
financially damaging, but my first concern before anything else is the
customers." All affected diners will be invited back to the restaurant
for free meals, and customers with cancelled reservations will go on to a
priority waiting list. Blumenthal is
often referred to as a culinary alchemist rather than a chef, creating
fiendishly complicated recipes in test tubes. The
self-taught chef opened The Fat Duck in 1995. In 2004 - the same year it was
awarded a third Michelin star - food and safety officers found
"borderline" levels of listeria in the foie gras and expressed concern
that "no core temperatures of the meat are taken". The problems
were swiftly dealt with, however, and Blumenthal has since introduced
stringent procedures. The closure
is unfortunately timed as Blumenthal's latest Channel 4 series, Feast, begins
on Tuesday. Viewers will see him prepare frog blancmange and blackbird pie in
a programme which explores food through the ages. |
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