Celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal has announced an online ballot, giving fans of the famous British chef a chance to experience the Fat Duck when it comes to Melbourne for it’s six month tenure.
With the restaurant set to open on February3, 2015, the ballot will be open from October 8 until October 26 2014 on Crown’s Fat Duck Melbourne website and will give 16,000 diners the opportunity to experience the $525 per head set menu once the restaurant opens.
Slated to be Australia’s most expensive dining experience, so far Crown has reportedly received around 40,000 inquiries from customers since Blumenthal announced the restaurant’s move there six months ago.
“We were totally overwhelmed with the response, it’s been unbelievable,” Blumenthal said, adding it shows “just the complete, utter food obsession that has happened over here”.
The entire staff of the original The Fat Duck restaurant in London are getting set to moving to Melbourne, whilst the London site is being renovated. “Unless we charge $10,000 a head, you’d be losing money,” Blumenthal told Good Food. “So Crown have got to get the balance between – you’ll have some high rollers, some big spenders, and that young couple who it might be their lifetime thing [to] save up and get in. For me it’s really important to get that balance.”
The Fat Duck kitchen will be located at the old Breezes restaurant site at Crown. The Melbourne Fat Duck will exist at Crown from February until August next year before being turned into a local outpost of Blumenthal’s London restaurant, Dinner by Heston, in October.
Last month Blumenthal said he chose Melbourne to open The Fat Duck because he saw Australia as a stepping stone into the exploding Asian market.
Blumenthal said he would be in Melbourne for about three weeks when The Fat Duck opens in February to ensure everything runs smoothly. “I will certainly be here for the first three weeks to a month for the opening.” “I’m certainly going to come back for the middle, and I’ll be back at the end… I might be there longer. It all depends on my commitments back home.”
Before Fat Duck’s $525 per person menu, Melbourne’s Vue de Monde was the most expensive place to eat in Australia; the degustation menu costs up to $250 per person, excluding wine. Attica, named best restaurant in Australia by Gourmet Traveller offers an eight-course tasting menu for $190 per person. The tasting menu at Momofuku Seiobo, a three-hat winner in the latest Good Food Guide, is $185 without wine. But a couple of hundred dollars per person could be seen as fairly cheap compared with the rest of the world.
