Fat Ducks, farts, foaming green tea and the man from Die Zeit

The Guardian

By Luke Harding in Berlin

It has been hailed as the world's best restaurant. Its dishes of snail porridge and sardine on toast sorbet have been acknowledged as pushing back the boundaries of modern cooking.
But the Fat Duck was clearly not to the taste of Germany's most famous restaurant critic.
In an excoriating review, Wolfram Siebeck railed against the service and the food. He described one dish as a "fart of nothingness".
Siebeck flew to Britain to eat at the Fat Duck after reading about the restaurant and its chef, Heston Blumenthal, in the Guardian.
After being ushered inside and warned not to bang his head on the low ceilings, Siebeck complained that he had to wait for 40 minutes before anyone brought him anything to eat. He also could not understand the waiters.
"If the Fat Duck is the best restaurant in the world, it has the worst service ... In places of this quality, the guest should not have to wait more than half an hour for bread and wine and would prefer not to be spoken to in an incomprehensible dialect."


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