No cutlery, 16 courses and pudding first: the rise of gimmick dining in Britain’s restaurants

You may not have heard of Albatross Death Cult, a new 14-seat restaurant in Birmingham, but its owner and head chef Alex Claridge is evidently keen for his venture not to slip away unnoticed. The name, which is what a Shoreditch branding agency might have called The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, is only the start of the eyeball-grabbing antics. 

The new venue will serve a 16-course seafood-led menu for £88, because 1988 is the year Claridge was born. Diners will eat in the kitchen, without cutlery. ‘A key theme running through it all is low-intervention,’ Claridge explains. ‘If I were cooking on a barren Scottish beach, for a small number of people, what would I serve? Sort of like culinary brutalism. One dish will be tuna tartare served on a rock. Guests will lick the rock. It’s fairly simple.’ 

Never to be outdone in such matters, Heston Blumenthal’s high temple of British nonsense cooking, The Fat Duck, is offering a jolly gimmick, a backwards version of its tasting menu called Topsy-Turvy Tasting. Until the end of the month, diners may choose to begin their dinner with Like a Kid in a Sweet Shop petits fours and Black Forest gâteau before moving on to Beef Royale and Sound of the Sea, for which they are given earphones so they can listen to seagulls and waves while they eat seafood. Finally, these kooky backwards diners will end their meal with an aperitif. Just the thing for the 10-year-old gourmet in your life.  

I have a high tolerance for this stuff, which has been a component of fine dining ever since the Romans enjoyed the gladiator fight laid on during the roast parrot. It has been at rather a low ebb in recent years, when it has sometimes felt as though every new opening is a pub-with-rooms, a hearty French bistro or an honest trattoria. There is more to eating out than a ‘well-executed’ steak frites.

Which is not to say these tricks and flourishes always work. Nobody who ate at Gary Neville and Ryan Giggs’s ‘boundary-pushing space-age Asian dining experience’ The Rabbit in the Moon will forget it in a hurry. Michael O’Hare served dishes off moonscape crockery in a near pitch-black room. The restaurant sadly closed in 2018, so you will have to take my word for it when I say that you shouldn’t have bothered. 

Nor could I unequivocally recommend Alvin Leung’s ‘Sex on the Beach’ dessert, designed to raise money for the Elton John AIDS Foundation, which comprised an edible pink condom lying flaccid on a bed of edible ‘sand’. The condom, I’m afraid to say, was also filled with a kind of cream. Did I enjoy eating it? Not especially. But I’m telling you about it now, as a kind of perverse boast. In so doing I remember where I was, who I was with, what was going on in the rest of my life. It’s something Alex Claridge understands, too. 

‘People seek external validation and show off on social media,’ he says. ‘I’m a hypocrite because I’m guilty of it too… Yes, I’m asking people to lick a rock. That might generate attention. But I’m trying to make this experience as primal as I can. I’m being serious, but I’m also just being creative and trying to create delicious food for as many people as possible.’ It is a noble ambition, and there is more than one way to do it.