Repeat visitors?

[dallardice]

I have only visited The Fat Duck once but enjoyed your tasting menu thoroughly. Having said that, I felt that once a year would be sufficient to appreciate your cuisine because so much of the joy was in the innovation and surprise in your dishes. On multiple visits I thought the innovation might be less impressive. In this respect, I feel the Fat Duck is different from other top-flight restaurants I have visited where I often want to revisit quickly to try other dishes.

Do you think your style of cooking, with its novel combinations and preparations, could ever be supported in a restaurant which relied on regular visits by a neighbourhood clientele? Is there room in the UK for only a few "Fat Ducks" which innovate to quite the same extent and if so would you expect some of your concepts to diffuse into more traditional French cuisine?

[Heston Blumenthal]

This is a vey good point and one that we have been looking at closely.

A comment that some of our regular customers make is that their level of enjoyment actually increases with each visit!

I dont mean to sound conceited by saying this but It did get me thinking.

Much of the work on the psychology of flavour being done at the moment is on flavour memory. Like all other memory systems, the current theory is that our memory exists in "attractor" states. These are effectively comfort zones where we can pigeon hole things.

So, a smell could be great or awful, depending on what attractor state it fell in to. Was it a nice memory or a bad one?

Relating this to food, indeed a customer may not want to return to The Fat Duck too often as the sense of surprise may, too a certain extent be lost but it could be replaced by the fact that the next time a dish is eaten, the flavour memory has formed new attractor states and could pigeon hole some of these dishes into a comfort zone meaning that a different sort of pleasure could be gained from eating them

I myself could not think of replicating The Fat Duck as this type of cooking needs so much fine tuning it would be almost impossible to replicate.

I do think however, that the science of cooking approach and even, to a certain extent, the psychology of flavour can be adapted to any style of cooking, be it modern, classical or home cooking.