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Is Heston Blumenthal preparing the ultimate Christmas menu at the Fat Duck at the exact time when this sort of feasting is beginning to feel outdated?
If you have £300 to spare this Christmas (and, hey, who doesn't?) there's good news: the Fat Duck has revealed a limited-edition Christmas menu. For the first time, on just three Sundays in December, guests will be able to enjoy a menu of nitro-poached pine aperitifs; Waldorf salad rocket lollies; a hot frankincense and myrrh-infused consommé prepared from a gold-leaf wrapped langoustine stock block; and a tree hung with a mixture of (don't try this at home) edible glass and silver baubles filled with prawn cocktail, langoustine tail or brawn. The table - but, of course - will be decorated with lots of tinsel. Tasty, tasty tinsel, that you can eat, made from orange and cinnamon flavoured turkey jelly.
Shocking, isn't it? No, not the price. That there are plenty of people out there who are able - with drinks and service - to drop the best part of a grand on a whim of a meal is a fact of life. An uncomfortable one, but no shocker. As for Heston's Christmas magic, it all sounds very clever and highly entertaining, but we would expect no less. He's serving a mysterious dessert that plays on the flavours created by a fungal rot, called botrytis cinerea, that comes with a Roquefort snow? Of course he is. Just thank god he's not serving dormouse again.
No, what is perhaps most surprising about all this, is that the Fat Duck is rowing against the general tide in the UK restaurant trade. Since the 2008 financial crash, companies have slashed Christmas entertainment budgets, but even before that the traditional turkey 'n' tinsel dinner was already in decline.
There are regional variations. Broadly, the further north you go, the more restaurateurs you'll find who will tell you that there is still a big demand for Christmas party bookings complete with the traditional lunch menu of prawn cocktail, followed by turkey, salmon or steak. However, many of those same restaurants now also offer a standard à la carte menu throughout December, to run alongside any seasonal set menu. This is a new trend. Partly to try and make up trade now that corporate bookings are slower, but also because for many people, the idea of eating turkey repeatedly in December now brings out their inner Christmas Grinch.
Heston B may be busy reinventing chipolatas using French black pudding (surely a case of unnecessarily tinkering with perfection?), but, in London, such traditional menu items are becoming rare. When I wrote about this for Restaurant Magazine recently, D&D London's managing director, David Loewi, was slightly incredulous when I suggested his venues might be serving turkey and all the trimmings throughout December. "Very few people, "he explained, "would take a traditional Christmas menu, certainly in our restaurants."
If we are, increasingly, bored by Christmas pudding, it hardly constitutes a problem. Even a first world one. However, I wonder how long, at home, never mind in restaurants, Christmas food - and not just Christmas Day dinner itself, but the whole idea of stuffing ourselves over the Christmas and New Year period - will continue to be seen as desirable and attractive? Rewind 50 or 100 years, to a time when most of us were grafting hard all year at manual jobs for pittance pay, and you can understand why the idea of scrimping, saving and then really over-indulging at Christmas was so precious. But, for the majority of Britons, that is no longer the case. It hasn't been for years. We're overweight, sedentary and, if you are earning regularly, food and drink is so comparatively cheap that - whether you shop at Iceland or Harrods - most of us can afford to eat and drink handsomely for most of the year.
If anything, this currently leads to a crazy ramping-up of consumption at Christmas which, enjoyable as it is, just as often feels like an endurance test. Could Heston be launching his first Christmas feast just at the point where the very notion is beginning to feel outdated? Or do you still relish the chance to eat, drink, be merry and rattle through several turkey dinners each Christmas?