IF YOU have been to every Michelin-starred restaurant in Scotland and you have tasted crispy pig's ear and sardines on toast ice cream, what is next for a foodie looking for a culinary buzz?
The Sheraton Hotel in Edinburgh thinks it has the answer, as it brings a new sensory eating experience to Scotland: blindfolded dining.
From next month, the hotel's Grill Room restaurant will invite guests to spend the entire evening blindfolded w
hile they tuck into a mystery five-course dinner without knowing or seeing what they are eating.
Each course of the £60 meal is created to appeal to the diners' other senses with interesting textures, aromas and taste to the food, and a different drink is served with every dish to bring out its flavours.
Conversation will be difficult as guests cannot see their fellow diners, and they cannot leave the table without the help of a waiter. But blindfolded dining is designed to be about the food itself rather than other distractions of the dining experience.
The concept of blind dining originated in restaurants in America and spread to Europe, with one restaurant in London – Dans Le Noir – serving meals in pitch darkness.
By depriving diners of sight their other senses are supposed to be sharpened and the true flavour of the food comes out because people cannot use their eyes to identify what they are eating.
Malcolm Webster, executive head chef at the Sheraton, said he hoped guests would be challenged by the experience. He said: "We are keen for our diners to fall in love with the food's true taste, letting the aromas, textures and varying combinations of flavours do all the work by taking away the sense which we rely on the most – sight."
Blindfolded dining has caught the interest of several top Scottish chefs, including Michelin-starred Tom Kitchin.
He said: "People are going to be paying so much more attention to what they are eating. I imagine the taste buds would find the salt, the oil, whether it's too greasy or just spicy enough, they are more aware of what's happening.
"We do a tasting menu where the customer doesn't know what they are going to get and they often get something they would never order, but when confronted with no choice they have actually eaten it and enjoyed it."
General manager of Dans Le Noir, Dominique Raclin, said: "It is also a social experience because in the dark everybody is the same. It's incredibly levelling. We destroy all the prejudice of the society, everybody is the same and we don't have any single tables so people sometimes sit with strangers and make friends."
He added that almost any food could be served in the restaurant's unusual circumstances, but hot drinks such as tea and coffee after the meal were not offered because of potential accidents.
But other Michelin-starred chefs in Scotland are not so keen on the idea, claiming sight is one of the most important senses in the enjoyment of the meal.
Craig Sandle, head chef at Number One restaurant at the Balmoral Hotel in Edinburgh, said: "A big part of going to a restaurant is the theatre of the service and the presentation of the food. The whole fine dining experience is more than just the taste of the food if you want to get a Michelin star."
Chris Firth-Bernard, head chef at the Summer Isles Hotel in Achiltibuie, claimed seeing food and drink was a vital part of how it tastes. He said: "If you take a red wine that is not particularly heavy and a white wine that is not highly perfumed, it is very difficult to tell the difference between them if you are blindfolded. I believe the visual impact of food and drink is equally as important as the taste."
'I thought the grouse was pigeon and the chicory was pak choi'RICHARD BATHAT THE age of 12 I was found guilty of swearing while on Boys Brigade camp. My punishment was to be blindfolded and have my mouth publicly washed out with soap. I swore I would never again appear blindfolded in public while allowing anyone to place unidentified objects in my mouth.
It's a simple rule I broke at No 1, when the good folk at The Balmoral laid on the culinary equivalent of trick or treat on Friday. Chef Craig Sandle got to satisfy himself that, yes, restaurant reviewers know nowt about food. I, on the other hand, got to be hand fed by the lovely Clare Morgan.
I guessed both components of the first amuse bouches, oyster and spinach, guessed the shredded apple half of the next but thought the pig's tail was sweetbreads and completely failed to identify the steak tartare with quail's egg yolk in an oyster shell, partly because I missed my mouth and tipped most of it down my shirt.
I did well enough on the next course, a seafood risotto. I identified the scallops, razor clams, surf clams, langoustine and calamari, but mistook the white truffle for a water chestnut.
On the main course I managed to identify the mashed potato, but didn't realise it had been smoked, and thought the grouse (which handily still had lead shot in it) was pigeon before yet more judicious prompting from the floor ("bigger!") helped me to the right conclusion. I didn't get the chicory, though, having it down as either pak choi or fennel.
From there on in I was triumphant – well, almost. I couldn't identify the Delice De St Cyr cheese nor the raisin bread or beetroot in port reduction, but I spotted the cheddar and then had a clean sweep of the pudding, spotting the Earl Grey-flavoured souffle and the almond-flavoured ice cream.
If guessing the food blindfolded was tricky, the booze verged on impossible. Thanks to the cucumber I was in the right area when it came to the gin and tonic (it was Hendricks, not Tanqueray) and I wasn't too far off with the pinot noir and rioja. But I'd better not tell you what I thought the Ardbeg was or I'd be given a one-way ticket to Gretna Green.
The full article contains 1044 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
