05/06/2026
I was crazy about ice cream as a kid. It has a powerful hold on my memory because every Sunday my sister and I would be dragged to Church Street Market near Marylebone by our grandmother. Although it was only the early 1970s, it now feels like another age. Among the stalls of bric-à-brac there were even rag-and-bone men selling things from horse and carts.
In return for trudging around the market, we were allowed to choose an ice cream from the Regent Snack Bar on Edgware Road.
It was run by a Sicilian family and had a wonderfully 1950s feel to it, with a gigantic plastic cone hanging above the front door and a little serving hatch opening onto the street. A man in a white coat, with the deadpan demeanour of a Mafia capo, would scoop and smooth the ice cream into cones using a traditional trowel-like metal spoon.
It tasted fantastic — partly because of the anticipation, the delayed gratification. Those factors are such an important part of our enjoyment of food. I saw the ice cream as a reward for the punishment of being dragged around the market, and that sense of reward gave it a special place in my memory. In fact, the whole idea of food and reward has underpinned many of the ways the restaurant has evolved over the years.
That ice-cream experience stayed with me and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it was one of the first things I wanted to perfect and serve at The Fat Duck. Ice cream was the first food I investigated in the kind of depth that later became second nature at the restaurant, which is one reason it has remained such a focus of creativity on the menu.
