Prices no deterrent for Heston Blumenthal’s Melbourne Fat Duck bucket listers
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Heston Blumenthal ... his Melbourne restaurant opens on February 3.
Photo: Penny Stephens
JESSICA SIER
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When James Mayne heard the $525 price tag attached to Blumenthal’s Fat Duck set menu, due to open in February in Melbourne, and slated to be Australia’s most expensive dining experience, he was not in the least dissuaded.
“For what could arguably be the best meal you might ever have, that seems pretty reasonable,” Mr Mayne, general manager at the Meatball & Wine Bar in Melbourne said.
“Heston is the closest non-fictional character to Willy Wonka alive,” he said. An online ballot is running for two weeks in October and will allow 16,000 diners the chance to experience the menu once the restaurant opens on February 3.
“I’m going to be online at one minute past nine on October 6, when the ballot system opens and I will be refreshing until [the ballot] closes on the 29th,” Mr Mayne said. “Eating at the Fat Duck is on my bucket list.”
The restaurant will temporarily relocate from Bray, just outside London and where it costs about $400 a head, to James Packer’s Crown Casino complex in Melbourne, bringing with it the entire staff. Crown initially received over 40,000 requests to book a table.
‘TOTALLY OVERWHELMED’ WITH RESPONSE
“We were totally overwhelmed with the response, it’s been unbelievable,” Mr Blumenthal said, adding it shows “just the complete, utter food obsession that has happened over here”.
Before Fat Duck’s $525 per person menu, Melbourne’s Vue de Monde was the most expensive place to eat in Australia; the degustation menu costs up to $250 per person, excluding wine. Attica, named best restaurant in Australia by
Gourmet Traveller offers an eight-course tasting menu for $190 per person. The tasting menu at Momofuku Seiobo, a three-hat winner in the latest
Good Food Guide, is $185 without wine. But a couple of hundred dollars per person could be seen as fairly cheap compared with the rest of the world.
At the Hard Rock Hotel in Ibiza, it costs $2200 to take one of the 12 seats at newly opened Sublimotion. The 20-course tasting menu is the most expensive on the planet. Bloomsbury’s Cafe in Dubai offers a cupcake made from 23-carat edible gold that cost $957 each.
Famed French chef Alain Ducasse boasts many of the most expensive restaurants from his stable of 28. The Michelin-starred chef’s Versaille-themed Restaurant Le Meurice in Paris has a five-course menu starting at $545.
Japan is notorious for its love of fine dining, and a meal from award-winning chef Kunio Tokuoka of Kyoto restaurant Kitcho will set you back more than $600 a head.
