What to serve when the finest chefs in Britain come for dinner
When Heston blumenthal, Raymond Blanc, Angela Hartnett, and dozens of other top chefs come to dinner, what do you cook? How about the turbot in chicken crust with sage, or the scallops with peanut sauce – or the snail flan?
If you are celebrating running the most successful restaurant in British history and serving the country's best chefs, there is no need to choose. Last night, Michel and Alain Roux served 25 dishes – including the three above – along with some of the finest champagne and claret in the world at the most extraordinary culinary gathering witnessed in a British restaurant.
The occasion was the family's 25th successive annual award of three Michelin stars to the Waterside Inn, the £150-a-head restaurant in the Thames-side village of Bray in Berkshire, which has maintained the highest standard of traditional haute cuisine for decades.
Winning a Michelin star is an accolade for which many chefs sweat in vain; Britain has only four three-star establishments. So when the Rouxs, father and son, came to wonder how they would celebrate 25 years at the top, they hit upon a twist to the usual practice of inviting the owners of the world's other three-star Michelin restaurants to a banquet. Instead, they invited the 140 UK chefs in possession of a Michelin star.
"We invited them all," recalled Michel Roux, 69, whose son Alain runs the restaurant day-to-day. "We were surprised. I was expecting about 60 or 70 or 80 of them to say yes, because not everyone can take a day off from the kitchens, but we have 116 of them, which is a huge compliment."
He went on: "I wanted to share it with the one, two and three-star chefs from the UK and not the three-star club from all over the world. There will be a lot of people with one star who are 25 to 35 years old – and they are the future of the UK."
On the guest list were some of the best known faces in British cooking, among them six who have recently had their own TV series – Blumenthal, who runs the neighbouring Fat Duck restaurant in Bray, fellow Frenchman Blanc, Hartnett, Tom Aikens, Marcus Wareing and John Burton Race.
drive from www.independent.co.uk
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