CELEBRITY chef Heston Blumenthal’s culinary creations have been banished from the menu at Popham’s Little Chef.
In 2008, Mr Blumenthal filmed a television documentary Big Chef, Little Chef for Channel 4, which focused on his efforts to revitalise the restaurant on the A303 at Popham between Basingstoke and Winchester.
Using the restaurant as a pilot, he introduced options such as braised ox cheeks and coq au vin and updated the decor.
These changes led to the eatery being included in The Good Food Guide in 2009, which said the restaurant has “decent cooking, displaying good basic technical skills and interesting combinations and flavours”.
But Mr Blumenthal, famous for his hi-tech approach and eccentric food combinations in his own restaurants, is no longer flavour of the month at Little Chef, and bosses at the troubled chain have now announced that they are scrapping the menu.
A spokesman for Little Chef said: “The problem is that no one wants his food. None of his dishes are popular.
“As of Monday, we’ve dropped all his dishes from the 10 restaurants where his food was available.”
Little Chef now wants to revert to more conventional British roadside fare such as all-day breakfasts.
A spokesman for Mr Blumenthal said: “His ideas were well received, and the Popham Little Chef concept was extremely successful, incredibly popular with the public, and was awarded a listing in the British Good Food Guide.”
As reported previously in The Gazette, the chain was put up for sale in May by private investment firm RCapital.
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