Those Who Are About To Dine Salute You

It is well-established that - for a certain sort of human being - danger adds savour to any pleasure. Fear of discovery, for example, has led charm and urgency to many a sexual tryst. A love of horror stories comes with the anticipation of restless nights of creeping shadows and creaking doors. Extreme sports are made more piquant by the prospect of serious injury. Even turning on the Channel Four News involves the fear of catching the final leaden minutes of Hollyoaks.

Dinner is not free from its careful calculation of risk and reward, for every domestic chef must at some point have hovered over a bubbling pan with that one extra chili like a card player over his last hand of Blackjack. The Japanese businessman tucking into his bowl of Fugu does so in the expectation of pleasure or death, but until recently no restaurant had more perfectly epitomised this tightrope walk than The Fat Duck at Bray: reputedly one of the world's finest restaurants and lately the venue for a nasty outbreak of what appears to have been norovirus.

Now, it's worth saying straight away that going to the The Fat Duck and contracting a common vomiting bug is rather like suffering from travel sickness on a humvee drive through downtown Baghdad. Nevertheless, the media seems to think this story noteworthy, and its timing could not have been more critical for Heston Blumenthal, who ventured into the celebrity chef business at around the time that its flush went bust.

Blumenthal is, in every sense, the dernier cri of celebrity chefs. Not only is he the latest fashion, but also the final whimper, of an entertainment industry that has flogged itself like a Medieval ascetic through the good days and now falls exhausted and blooded until the next trend makes itself known. Even Blumenthal's catchphrase (the less-than-pithy "Please don't try this at home") is a desperate inversion of the labour-saving Home Economics of Delia and Nigella. Moreover, where the personal charm of those redoubtable ladies was chief part of their appeal, Heston seems to have made gaucheness his stock in trade. At one's perfect dinner party, he might be serving the food but he wouldn't get a seat at table.

And yet, such is the world and such is human nature that one cannot help feeling that norovirus may yet prove to be Blumenthal's unlikely source of salvation, because the thing that threatened to ruin his reputation is not how sick his food makes you but how good it tastes. If the choice is between snail porridge and ordinary porridge, the news that they both taste good only convinces me to go for the ordinary porridge, which has the enduring virtue of being cheap. If I am going to pay a small fortune for snail porridge, I want to run the risk that it will taste as foul as it sounds. Or at least that it will infect me with a vomiting bug.

With Heston's hugely entertaining highbrow take on Bush Tucker Trials coming to an end this week one can only wonder what fate holds in store for him next. My advice to him is to ensure that the Grim Reaper is riding pillion on his next venture.