Heston’s Meat Fruit gets a makeover

Heston Blumenthal’s iconic ‘Meat Fruit’ dish – chicken liver parfait masquerading as a mandarin – has been transformed into a plum for the festive season.

Mean Fruit’s makeover: a perfect plum

Dinner by Heston’s executive chef, Ashley Palmer-Watts, has given the dish a makeover for Christmas, replacing the mandarin jelly with a plum-flavoured gel casing infused with cinnamon, cloves, long pepper and star anise.

To give it an extra kick, Palmer-Watts adds a splash of Mas Amiel Maury, a Languedoc sweet wine made from Grenache Noir, into the mix.

Instead of a mandarin, a hat tip to the restaurant’s location inside the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Knightsbridge, the festive edition is shaped like a perfect plum.

Head Sommelier Stefan Neumann recommends pairing it with Castelnau de Suduiraut 2008 Sauternes. The dish is available from today until the end of the year, on both the private dining set menu and the restaurant’s à la carte offering, priced at £21.

The original Meat Fruit dish is one of the most well known and photographed in London, having become an instant hit with Dinner opened in 2011.

Dinner has two Michelin stars and is currently at number 36 of The World’s 50 Best Restaurants list.

The original Meat Fruit

db’s Lucy Shaw got rather excited by the original Meat Fruit when she reviewed the restaurant in 2012.

Here’s what she had to say about it…

No trip to Dinner is complete without sampling its signature dish Meat Fruit. Having enjoyed the clever creation vicariously in numerous reviews, I’d been dreaming of and drooling over it for a year.

Never in my adult life have I so lusted after something edible. I’d ask friends to recount their experience of the enrobed meat globe in minute detail, conjuring the flavours in my imagination and eking out the pleasure in my mind.

A lucky win at a Halloween quiz (the prize, bequeathed by Inter Rhône, being a meal at a restaurant of our choosing) and here I was sitting down to lunch at Dinner, mere moments away from my own mandarin.

Before the waitress can even take our order I request it, the urgency of the situation heightened by its impending resolution. She asks whether I’d like to share it among the table. “No”, I reply emphatically. Such a longed-for experience could not be tarnished by prying knives.

Ten minutes later and it’s in front of me, as beautiful as I’d imagined it. Masquerading as a mandarin, its faintly dimpled orange skin glistens expectantly in the light. My mouth begins to water.

Not wanting to spoil its Platonic form, I have to force myself to cut into its skin, which reveals a dusky pink, creamy interior of chicken liver parfait.

Grabbing a piece of the accompanying grilled bread, I slather on a generous scoop and take my first mouthful, rewarded at first with the refreshing tang of the mandarin jelly, and soon after the luxurious, rich, heavenly parfait.

Playful, indulgent and utterly delicious, it’s the closest Dinner gets to a Fat Duck trompe l’oeil trick.