Why culinary twists create more memorable meals

Surprise! You don’t always get what you’re expecting when dining out. Like the time I ordered a knickerbocker glory and worked my way steadily down the tall sundae glass of fruit, nuts, ice-cream and syrups only to find a very large, very dead blowfly at the bottom.

Other surprises have been less traumatic. On my first visit to Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck restaurant in the UK in 2001, there were playful tricks at every turn. When a chef builds his name by combining garlic purée with coffee jelly, and caviar with white chocolate, you tend to look at the bread and butter on the table with deep suspicion. They turned out to be perfectly normal, but the smoked bacon-and-egg ice-cream with tomato jam was not. And the dark chocolates infused with pipe tobacco were very spooky, filling my lungs and fooling my brain into thinking I had taken up smoking again.

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A few years on, and Blumenthal was digging deep into Britain’s past to come up with his biggest surprise yet: a trompe l’oeil that referenced the “pome dorres”, or meats fashioned into fruits, of medieval England. His Meat Fruit looks like a perfect mandarin, the skin textured and the little stalk and leaf bright green. But … surprise! The skin is a tangy mandarin gel, the filling a velvety mousse of foie gras and chicken liver parfait.

I’ve never forgotten it – and that, apparently, is why chefs love to surprise us. According to the 2015 book Surprise: Embrace the Unpredictable and Engineer the Unexpected, by LeeAnn Renninger and Tania Luna, our bodies freeze for a 25th of a second when we’re surprised and our emotions are magnified by up to 400 per cent. That acts on the dopamine in our brain, which locks it away as a flashbulb moment, akin to remembering where you were when Princess Diana died. It’s a plot twist on a plate.

So is the large green olive – which isn’t an olive at all – created by Ferran and Albert Adrià at Spain’s El Bulli: it’s actually green olive juice that implodes in your mouth (not sleight-of-hand so much as reverse spherification, using sodium gluconate and sodium alginate). And the huge, edible balloons blown by Grant Achatz of Chicago’s Alinea that transform a grown-up dinner into a kid’s birthday party. They’re the culinary equivalent of shouting “boo!” – evoking surprise, awe and wonderment. And memories.

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