sent from: London, UK. destination: West New York, NJ, USA

We went to Heston Blumenthal’s Dinner restaurant last night. We’ve not made it (yet!) to The Fat Duck, but your expectations are set that it may be a different experience from that famously experimental cuisine that he has become famous for, when you step into the Mandarin Hotel, marbled columns and dark wood railiings that were signatures of luxury a few decades ago. The menu is based around English recipes from old documents and manuscripts going back to the 14th century. The result is an ultra high-end gastro-pub, and you could see the crowd were there to enjoy their company, to be seen and to look good, as much as for the food. We loved it, everything was impeccable and the flavours so wonderfully balanced. After a meal like that, I have a perverse desire to chase it up with the cheapest, basest, most generic fast food imaginable. Ha.