There are chefs who define an era, and in the early 2000s, few shaped gastronomy more profoundly than Heston Blumenthal and Ferran Adrià. Their work didn’t just challenge convention—it reimagined what a restaurant experience could be. Liquid nitrogen clouds drifting across the table, soundscapes served as part of a dish, Alice-in-Wonderland narratives guiding the diner from course to course. For the first time, a meal became a fully orchestrated sensory journey.
After the global success of The Fat Duck, Blumenthal was invited to bring that same disruptive thinking to the newly built Mandarin Oriental in London. The result was Dinner by Heston, a concept rooted in historic British recipes, all of them centuries ago, reinterpreted through his personal view and his signature curiosity. The restaurant was an instant phenomenon. And when Atlantis The Royal in Dubai sought to anchor its dining scene with star power, Dinner by Heston was the obvious choice.
As you enter the massive dining room the first thing that meets the eye is a gigantic mechanical pineapple. One that opens and closes through out the evening. It’s places in the middle of a grand dining room seating about 100 people in dark red booths. A design mixing the comforting with refined luxury.
For our evening, we were offered a hybrid menu—a conversation between Dinner by Heston’s historically inspired dishes and a few anniversary creations from The Fat Duck. It felt like stepping into a time capsule of Blumenthal’s greatest hits, distilled for a new audience.
We began with a frozen beetroot and horseradish bite, flash-crystallized tableside in liquid nitrogen. The theatrics feels dated but the result was a delicious bite where the nitrogen provided texture and as the bite dissolves on the tongue, the sharp sweetness of beetroot meeting the heat of horseradish.
The next dishes shifted from showmanship to sheer flavor. Norwegian scallops arrived paired with white chocolate and caviar—a combination that shouldn’t work but absolutely does. The sweetness of the chocolate softened the saltiness of the roe, allowing the scallop’s natural sweetness to sit comfortably in the center. A dish that looked like a strange combination on paper but reality was a very harmonious dish.
A turbot dish followed, inspired by Escoffier and traditionally served with champagne sauce. Because alcohol isn’t permitted in cooking in Dubai, the kitchen crafted a non-alcoholic sparkling wine gel to mimic the brightness and depth of champagne. Put in a gel it trapped the bubbles perfectly. A great side to a classic delicious dish.
Before the main course, we took a brief detour back to the Mandarin Oriental with the iconic chicken liver parfait set in a mandarin gel resembling a mandarin. It’s a dish that has been photographed endlessly, but it remains impressive. Once you get past the playful presentation, the parfait is silky, deep, and precisely balanced—a reminder that technique and flavor, not theatrics, is the real foundation of Heston’s work.
Our final savory course was venison with beetroot and truffles, served alongside Heston’s now-famous triple-cooked fries. His pursuit of the perfect fry—boiled, blast-frozen, and fried twice—has been documented across multiple TV shows, and the result here was a crisp, golden shard of potato. Impressive, though to my taste almost too crunchy, leaving little room for that soft interior that truly showcases the quality of the potato. The venison, however, was a triumph: tender, deeply flavored, and plated with a quiet confidence that didn’t need embellishment.
Dessert came as a trio: two inventive, one purely delicious. The playful bacon-and-scrambled-egg ice cream—again finished in liquid nitrogen—and a bright lychee-mango composition showed the kitchen’s creative instincts. But the one that stole the evening was the tipsy cake. As the name indicates it is traditionally soaked in alcohol, here reimagined without it, the cake was lush, buttery, and fragrant—so good that it overshadowed the more elaborate creations on the plate. It was the dish we kept returning to in conversation long after the table had been cleared.
In a city as polished and theatrical as Dubai, Heston Blumenthal’s universe fits naturally. The presentation can at times feels dated but the storytelling entertains. My personal favorites were the more classic dishes that shows that beneath the spectacle lies something far more enduring: a commitment to flavor. Dinner by Heston doesn’t just bring star power to Atlantis The Royal—it brings a sense of culinary history, reimagined for a place that thrives on the future.
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