On avant-garde’s front line

Mashed potatoes with white chocolate? Lobster with red beet sorbet? Prawns with a pink grapefruit gelee, caviar foam and onion bavarois?

Ludovic Lefebvre, the new chef at Bastide, is the Freddy Kruger of the kitchen, more interested in shocking customers than in pleasing them.

That’s unfortunate. There are some kitchens in which bizarre-sounding experiments actually work, where dishes that may seem more gimmickry than gastronomy actually taste good.

One such place is the Fat Duck, a 45-seat restaurant housed in a 350-year-old pub in Bray-on-Thames, a small town 35 miles west of London.

I had a wildly experimental and largely satisfying dinner there earlier this year, shortly after the restaurant became one of only two in England to have three stars from Michelin.

While Lefebvre’s attempt to dazzle diners at Bastide seems to be novelty for its own sake, Heston Blumenthal, the chef-owner at the Fat Duck, is creating dishes grounded in his well-researched scientific theories on flavor, aroma and texture, even though many originate in his own idiosyncratic curiosity.

Having turned his kitchen into a laboratory, Blumenthal, 38, often tries certain techniques or combines certain ingredients “just to see what happens” -- a phrase that is his mantra, his mission and his motivation. And he’s now embarked on some of his strangest experiments yet.

That’s saying something for a chef who has long served bacon and egg ice cream, white chocolate and caviar, a sorbet made of sardines on toast -- and a fresh oyster with passion fruit jelly, sprayed with lavender.

Blumenthal thinks all the senses, including hearing, should come into play at table. So he’s working with scientists at Oxford University to try to figure out how to “bend the frequency of the sound that, say, a carrot makes when you bite into it,” hoping the different, unexpected sound will alter the diner’s sense of the carrot’s (or any food’s) taste and smell.

“So far,” he says, “we haven’t figured out how to do that, short of outfitting people with headphones at the table ... and I don’t see that happening.”

Me neither. But I was equally dubious when I first heard about the avant-garde dishes made by Ferran Adria at El Bulli, on the Costa Brava, north of Barcelona, and by Grant Achatz at Trio, in Evanston, outside Chicago.

I’ve since eaten at both restaurants, as well as the Fat Duck, and I’m a believer.

Pleasing the palate

Yes, a few of Blumenthal’s and Achatz’s dishes seem contrived. And yes, Lefebvre and other imitators -- seemingly more interested in “Look at me” than “Enjoy my food” -- are giving culinary experimentation a bad name. Adria, the most talented of the trio, has spawned a generation of imitators who use foam so often that I leave their tables feeling as if I’m stepping out of a bubble bath.

But the best cutting-edge chefs are creating dishes that please and delight the palate while simultaneously engaging and tantalizing the mind.

Even when Blumenthal’s dishes didn’t work, I found myself intrigued by what he was trying to achieve. With many of Lefebvre’s dishes, the sweetness was so overpowering that all I could think of was how to avoid falling into a diabetic coma.

Blumenthal is the alchemist-as-chef, the one who seems to be experimenting the most directly at a pure science level. Just last week, Britain’s Biotechnology and Biological Science Research Council awarded him a $24,000-a-year, three-year grant to hire a doctoral student to study “molecular gastronomy” and to convert a room behind the restaurant into an actual laboratory, complete with a “multi-sensory tasting room” so he can study the effects of texture, sight and sound on how food tastes.

All this sounds deadly serious -- or perhaps just deadly, if you’re a restaurant traditionalist -- but the playful nature of Blumenthal’s experiments and, more important, the simple fact that most of his dishes work at a basic sensory level made my dinner there eminently enjoyable as well as intellectually stimulating.

Blumenthal first fell in love with food and cooking on a vacation in France with his parents when he was a teenager. The trip triggered an immersion in the classic literature of food, and Blumenthal found himself profoundly influenced by the first edition of Harold McGee’s “On Food and Cooking.” He worked at various jobs, including -- very briefly -- two restaurants, and in 1995, he bought the pub that became the Fat Duck.

Although he originally made the pub “a fairly bourgeois place,” experimentation -- and inquiring telephone calls to various British scientists -- soon came to dominate his day.

Most of Blumenthal’s experiments involve what he calls “flavor pairings” -- matching two seemingly disparate products that actually have some subtle molecular similarity.

“You have to use salt when you make a lot of sweet things, so I tried to pair white chocolate with various salty things, and I finally hit on caviar,” he told me when my family and I and two friends had dinner at the Fat Duck. “I was incredibly surprised by how those two ingredients fused together. I couldn’t understand why until I went to this flavor company in Geneva and found out that they both have amines -- amino acid -- so each enhances and connects with and complements the other.”

On the palate, the salt and the sweet remain separate and distinct and yet, somehow, not in conflict -- unlike, say, the dish at Bastide in which the white chocolate obliterates the taste of the potato.

Blumenthal made similar discoveries about molecular commonalities in mustard and red cabbage, which contains mustard oil and which led to one of the most intensely flavored dishes of our dinner: a scoop of mustard ice cream served in a red cabbage gazpacho.

That was our fourth course, though, and by then, we already knew we were in for an extraordinary evening. Our tasting menu began when a waitress approached our table with a silver canister and a large bowl. The bowl was filled with liquid nitrogen -- chilled to minus 320 degrees. The canister was filled with a blend of egg whites, sugar, lime juice, green tea and vodka. She squirted the blend into the liquid nitrogen, then quickly used two spoons to form the rapidly solidifying substance into small ovals, one at a time.

Each tasted like a clean, very light mousse-cum-sorbet, with just a hint of acid -- an ideal palate freshener to start the meal.

After our sorbet, Blumenthal served us two 1-inch squares of jelly -- “orange and beetroot,” the waitress said. OK. Except that the orange-colored jelly was actually made of beetroot, and the purple jelly was made of orange. “That’s just to get you thinking, as well as tasting, right at the start,” Blumenthal said.

As a result, we probably talked more the rest of the evening than we normally would have about just what the chef was trying to achieve. We kept tasting and thinking, right through 19 courses that included snail porridge with parsley and shaved fennel; risotto made with cauliflower and dusted with cocoa powder; and -- my personal favorite -- salmon encased in licorice, served with asparagus spears.

Bold pairings

This was another of Blumenthal’s “flavor pairings.” The common molecule here is asparginine, present in both asparagus and licorice. Blumenthal makes a juice from licorice root, adds two gelling agents, boils the mixture and dips in a square piece of salmon several times so that the gelatinized licorice forms several thin layers around the fish.

Initially startled, I found that with each bite, my pleasure increased and my sense of surprise began to fade. It was kind of like the first time I heard Bob Dylan sing with an electric guitar after all those brilliant acoustical guitar performances.

Then there was the dish that most of my table didn’t like -- the sardines-and-toast sorbet. Three in our group thought the sardine flavor much too strong. But Blumenthal said, “Sardines on toast were one of my childhood favorites, and I also loved ice cream. So I figured why not combine them all in a PacoJet Machine and see what happens.”

Like Proust with his madeleines, Blumenthal believes strongly in both the sensory and totemic power of memory and the impact of memory on taste.

We had, for example, a jellied quail consomme layered with a puree of peas, set in a cream of langoustines, topped with foie gras parfait and accompanied by a slice of “truffle and oak toast.” It’s a stunningly rich dish, a veritable symphony of strong flavors. But before you get to the symphony, you get a tiny overture, a thin strip of edible oak. Why?

“To get you ready for the unusual taste and smell of oak in the dish itself,” Blumenthal says.

Why should I want to smell and taste oak while I’m eating?

Because, he says, the smell of oak is “one of the first things you get when you walk into a wine cellar in a winery, and I wanted to reproduce that experience and make you remember it.”

Although he lost me there, it was one of the few times that night I felt lost. I wouldn’t want to eat Blumenthal’s food every night. Sometimes a simple rare steak is the perfect dinner. But not being a purist, I’m open to novelty at table, to the idea of cooking as art, dinner as theater -- as long as the food tastes good. At the Fat Duck -- unlike Bastide -- almost all of it did.

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com.