THE FAT DUCK (Rest.)

*****
This mere 18cm long dinner was a wise idea given the final furlongs of the trip approaching. The next day we faced dinner at The Waterside Inn which is Britain's longest running three-star restaurant (and not even in Restaurant's Top 100 anymore, let alone their Top 50), followed by lunch at The Fat Duck which conveniently is in the same quaint little village on the upper reaches of the Thames.

Bray - for that is the name of the village - is only a 15 minute drive up the motorwayfrom Heathrow airport. We again arrive with time to spare so we walk down the river and study one of Isambard Kingdom Brunel's most beautiful feats of engineering. His railway bridge over the Thames at Maidenhead has impossibly wide, flat and elegant arches. Dinner at the Waterside Inn is similarly classic; grouse, soufflés and impeccable silver service (complete with birds carved at the table and choreographed silver cloche reveals). It's also quiet raucous as groups concentrate of catching up, and couples on holding hands, without the gobsmacking, and gob-shutting, awe of reaching a site of culinary pilgrimage oft found at the other culinary shrines.

We sleep in.Then have breakfast in bed trying to stint on the Viennoiserie in fairness to our final meal on the trail for the world's best restaurant. Currently I'm with the list ranking while the woman I love has Can Roca first, Noma second, Mugaritz a close third and El Bulli in fifth because she's suspects that The Fat Duck has to be less weird and more delicious that Adria's place.

The Fat Duck has perennially been Robin to El Bulli's Batman. While it headed the list in 2005 - the last restaurant to do so before El Bulli's current domination - for the last four years chef Heston Blumenthal has had to be content with second place to his Catalan friend.

If Ferran Adria is the technician and visionary of this culinary modernism then Blumenthal is the showman. While Aduriz and Redzepi might make wry jokes it's as if Blumenthal is after belly laughs. It is something that he achieved on my first visit when we discovered that what was sprinkled from a fine silver bowl over the root vegetable crumble served with guinea fowl was actually popping candy! A second visit was marred by aloof French service and equally uptight English diners which made the experience more stuffy and reverential rather than joyous. From our previous conversations however I know this has vexed the chef who ideally wants his customers to arrive with a sense of childlike excitement and anticipation. In part this is because he has research that shows that - like field-shot game - less stressed customers taste better.

On this visit everything seems a little changed. The cooking was better and changes in plating of classics like the salmon under a veil of licorice gel has made them less about visual impact and more about making them eat well. The pointillist storm of grapefruit carpels that previously spread across the plate might have looked pretty but were just a pain to eat.

One thing that hasn't changed is a long-running favourite. A layered bowl of crayfish cream, jelly of quail, chicken liver parfait and pea remains a classic journey of different levels of smoothness. This sends your spoon and palate through an ever evolving journey through these strata as the different textures and well-defined by complimentary flavours of saltiness and sweetness ebb and flow against each other with every mouthful. The Sound of the Sea also remains unchanged but still just as delicious. This is Blumenthal's famous evocation of the seaside that comes complete with individual conch housed i-Pod playing a soundtrack of seagull cries and lapping waves; the choice of a rich old riesling as the match managed to unfurl other complexities in both the dish and in the wine.

I'd love to say that the i-Pod dish seems like a sideshow; trying to hard to recreate a beach scape on a plate with oyster foam, tapioca sand and slices of seafood and seaweed and I would have if I hadn't taken my final mouthful. An oily fish - possibly mackerel - leaps up and tastes so shockingly vivid I can only put this down to the mental impact of the soundtrack. It's a slightly unnerving moment but nothing as unnerving as watching as the next door tablefalls silent for 10 minutes while they are hooked up to their i-Pods. These two couples have spent the previous hour playing a game of one-upmanship over who has the most stables on their property. With close packed tables, as there are here, you'd better hope for less dull, self-absorbed people as your neighbours when you go.

The proximity of others also means that you are likely to be watched as you eat, such is the beguiling performances of so many of the dishes. This still seems a little strange and intrusive to me - inspite of the fact that I now do it for a living on TV. This tendency for people to sticky-beak is thanks to how visually arresting so many of The Fat Duck's dishes are. Their famous palate cleanser of green tea and lime meringue “poached”, or more accurately frozen, by bobbing it in steaming liquid nitrogen at the table started this trends a good few years back but recently Blumenthal and his team have amped up the theatricality of his dishes. This reaches it's greatest heights with the new menu. Now that crayfish mousse dish comes with a bed of oak moss to which tendrils of mist-like dry ice cling. Then there's the egg cracked into a copper pot at the table and “scrambled” into an icecream thanks to more liquid nitrogen. The trick is the egg shell has been emptied then and re-filled with an egg and bacon flavoured custard. Even more bamboozling is an accompanying cup of tea that is both hot AND cold.

Or how about a dessert that arrives in a little cast iron pot set in a bowl that's upholstered in red leather like the wingback in some baronial library? Here liquid is poured into the bowl prompting billows of dry ice laden with the aromas of that library - woodsmoke from the fire, leather, etc. As this happens the cast iron pot's lid is lifted to reveal a barley ice cream sitting on top of a compote of fig, apple and dried fruit. This is all then flambéed with whisky. It takes a second to realize what is happening; that those are hot flames licking round the ice cream and yet it isn't melting. Taste a spoonful when inferno dies down and magically the icecream has remained cold but the pot and compote are hot. Now that really scrambles the old noggin and has me questioning whether The Fat Duck is a restaurant or a conjuror's parlour.

Personally Ilove Blumenthal's desire to engender a childlike enjoyment in people eating at The Fat Duck, it makes for an amazingly unusual and memorable experience.

There are also other more traditionally delicious dishes which keeps the wife happy too. Like buttery cubes of roast foiegras set against the relieving bite of a puree of gooseberry, the savoury saltiness of kombu, sesame seeds and a crisp wafer of crab or pigeon matched with “umbles” (as offal used to be called by the Brits) and a perfectly chosen 2002 Le Dome Saint Emilion.

This is one of several new dishes on the menu inspired by Blumenthal's increasing obsession with Britain's culinary past. There's also a sort of slushie made from chocolate and wine and a very pretty Taffety Tart that pairs the flavours of rose and fennel with caramelised apple and crispy pastry. Both take their inspiration from C17th century recipes howevereven such classics aren't safe from Blumenthal's trademark showmanship.

A dish called mock turtle soup might leap up from an 1850 recipe but the actual realization is pure Fat Duck 2009, albeit one that plays on the Alice in Wonderland connection with the mock turtle. A gold-plated bouillon cube in the shape of a pocket watch arrives in a tea cup. Hot water is poured over it from a tea pot as a second reference to the Mad Hatter's tea party. The resulting mushroom, Madeira and beef consommé is wonderfully intense, exact in flavour, and flecked beautifully with gold. This is then poured over a little assembly of compressed slices of ox tongue and lardo, small cubes of pickled cucumber, truffle and turnip, plus a faux poached egg (actually constructed artfully from turnip and swede). A matched glass of Madeirais another example of a vey successful wine marriage.

The meal ends with wine gums set in a historical and geographical context and,just like at the best children's parties where there is a conjuror, every guest leaves with lolly bag full of Fat Duck style sweets. This all combines to ensure memories of this meal linger longer, even if the memory of the flavours aren't quite as vivid. A week after we get back my wife declares she is promoting The Fat Duck to her equal favourite of the five with thanks to that memorable theatre of giving an edge to Blumenthal's largely delicious dishes.