The appliance of science: The Fat Duck

They say no good deed goes unpunished. As Doreen McInerney struggles to manoeuvre a huge ball of collapsing meringue into her mouth under the curious gaze of the Fat Duck's clientele, you can almost see the message "Why the hell did I let myself in for this?" scrolling behind her panicking eyes.

Doreen was one of the winning bidders in the Independent's annual charity auction last Christmas; the £2,500 she pledged for the chance to accompany me on a restaurant review goes to the Green Shoots appeal supporting charities in Africa. Amazingly, it's the third successive year that Doreen has been the highest bidder. And it's a testament to her generosity and gastronomic curiosity that this reticent Dubliner submits to the yearly ordeal of having her photograph taken in a public place.

It's all about the food, of course. Last year's venue, the legendary El Bulli in Spain, was always going to be a tough act to follow. A visit to The Fat Duck was the only logical next step. Heston Blumenthal's crucible of molecular gastronomy in Bray regularly shares top honours with El Bulli in surveys of the best restaurants in the world. And crucially, the globe-trotting Doreen had never been there.

The one thing everyone knows about The Fat Duck is that certain items on the menu are a bit ... eccentric. But behind all the eyebrow raising and sniggering about dishes like snail porridge, there is a much more interesting story. Blumenthal's obsessive drive to innovate and experiment is fuelled not just by technical curiosity, but by the desire to reconnect taste with the other senses, and to link it to expectation, emotion and memory.

Doreen and I got a blast of Blumenthal's enthusiasm first-hand, when he unexpectedly appeared before lunch to whisk us around his research laboratory. Eyes sparkling behind his brainiac specs, he expanded on his latest obsession, an atomised spray that evokes the multi-layered smell of an old-fashioned sweet shop. While he dashed off to collect some bit of kit for the demonstration, Doreen whispered, "He's like a kid in a sweet shop himself, isn't he?"

Blumenthal's sense of fun permeates the Fat Duck's tasting menu. But though there may be playfulness, the joke is never on the customer. Over the course of a lunch spanning three hours and some 15 courses, we were teased and tantalised, but the final effect was deeply and wonderfully satisfying.

Things got off to a wobbly start - quite literally - with that tricky-to-eat meringue thingummy. A palate-prepping mousse of egg white flavoured with green tea, lime and vodka is frozen in liquid nitrogen at the table, then speared on a glass skewer. The idea is that you pop it into your mouth whole. In practice, it's slightly too big; embarrassing when you're the first table to be served, and the rest of the room is watching as dry ice rises from your table like something from The Sorcerer's Apprentice.

What follows is like an IQ test for the palate. Round one: vivid red and orange lozenges that are introduced as beetroot and orange jellies. Counter-intuitively, it's the orange one that tastes of golden beetroot, while the ruby one has the citrus tang of blood orange, a riddle the brain struggles to decode.

I'm not going to list everything else we ate dish by dish; the tasting menu has been comprehensively documented (with photos) by an eager brigade of food bloggers. But here are some of our stand-out moments.

An incense box of moss is opened table-side, and liquid nitrogen poured over it, releasing a billowing forest-floor aroma. A strip of oak moss film is placed on the tongue, and melts to flood the mouth with an uncategorisable taste. The next mouthful - black truffle on toast - goes into high definition, the oak calling out all the dark complexity of the truffle. Then things go wide-screen and Technicolor for an amazing dish that layers pea purée, quail jelly, langoustine cream and foie gras ice cream, a tour de force of contrasting tastes, textures and temperatures.

The famous snail porridge is a dish of subtle maturity that seems to deplore its silly reputation with a murmured, "There's nothing to see here, folks, move along." Plump snails, Joselito ham and shaved fennel are layered on a vivid green porridge that has a gentle outdoorsy taste of oats and herbs. On the plate, it makes perfect sense. Even Doreen, who has managed to get this far without ever having eaten a snail, was won over.

Many of the combinations are instant classics - the partnering of seared foie gras with cherry sauce and Amaretto jelly for example. A few are more interesting than delicious; salmon poached in liquorice looked fabulous, like a black lacquered box, but the marriage of flavours may well be an acquired taste. Blumenthal is famous for his savoury ice creams, and once you've stopped associating that chilled creaminess with a final burst of sweetness, they can work brilliantly, like the sardine on toast sorbet that is the highlight of a Japanese-accented fish course, or the Pommery grain mustard ice cream that tempers the acidity of a red cabbage gazpacho.

If all this sounds rather dry and academic, I've failed to convey the shock of pleasure evoked by almost every mouthful. Yes, it would be possible for the geekily-inclined to sit there deconstructing every dish. But you could also - as Doreen and I did - relax and enjoy a rather jolly, gossipy lunch (or at least as gossipy as two people can get when they only meet once a year as the result of a charity auction).

There's an unstuffiness about The Fat Duck that is rare among restaurants of its status. The staff seem relaxed, and seem to genuinely care that we're having a good time. And for every swanky haute-European couple who are here to tick it off on their must-do list, there's another table with a laughing family group, or excitable food-freaks snapping photos of their plates. The snug interior may have come up in the world since the place first opened 11 years ago, but there's no getting round those low ceilings or munchkin-like proportions. "The tables are rather close together for a three star," as Doreen observed, and let's face it, she's dined in a lot more of them than I have.

We were feeling giddy with pleasure when a succession of sweet dishes started to arrive, several of which paid tribute to childhood treats. There was a tiny cornet filled with apple ice cream, a "lollipop" of carrot and orange tuile, cubes of sugared beetroot jelly, and a version of the sherbert fountain containing a strange pine-flavoured powder that you sucked from a vanilla pod.

The meal culminates in a playful riff on the theme of a hotel breakfast; first, "cornflakes" of shaved parsnip are sprinkled from a cereal box, and served with parsnip milk; then comes the "full English", comprising caramelised pain perdu, bacon and egg ice cream, a slick of salt-sweet toffee, all working together to sensational effect. Sounds beyond weird I know, but it was great.

The breakfast course got us ruminating on the Britishness of Blumenthal's cooking; several of the dishes have their roots in home cooking, or forgotten childhood treats. As a self-taught obsessive, Blumenthal may have built his expertise experimenting with classic French cuisine, but a meal at the Fat Duck is a very un-French experience.

At the end of our lunch, Doreen confessed that she'd been a bit nervous about the expedition; how could The Fat Duck match up to last year's meal at El Bulli, which had radically changed her expectations of dining out? But match up it certainly did. "I was reeling when we came out of El Bulli," she said. "But after this meal, I feel completely satisfied. The man's a genius."

And a very generous genius to boot. At the end of our lunch, we discovered that Heston had left us each a signed and dedicated copy of his new book, In Search of Perfection. What's more, he donated the cost of our meal to this year's Independent auction. We'll be launching the auction again in early December but this year Doreen has decided to retire from the bidding. After all, it's best to go out at the very top.

The Fat Duck, High Street, Bray, Berkshire, 01628 580333. Tasting menu £97.75 per person without wine; à la carte £80 per person

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