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After months of speculation of a move down under the British chef Heston Blumenthal has announced plans to close his Fat Duck restaurant in the UK for six months and relocate his entire team to Australia.
The Fat Duck in Australia will open in February 2015 inside the Crown Casino, Melbourne. The chef says that the entire team will relocate to Aus with the menu from the Fat Duck also being exported.
Blumenthal explained to The Guardian: "We are going to shut the Fat Duck and bring it to Melbourne,“ he added the menu would be “somewhere between 12 and 18 courses, it's four hours of eating and it's pure, total theatre – like falling down a rabbit hole into a wonderland.”
It seems the move is only temporary for the Fat Duck. After the six month period, Blumenthal will open Dinner by Heston in the same location, transporting the restaurant concept he started in London to a permanent location in Aus - his first permanent location outside the UK.
Blumenthal explained that the move comes at the perfect time and will allow the Fat Duck to celebrate their 20th anniversary in 2015 with a bang. “This is an incredible opportunity and I am thrilled that it has worked out the way it has. The Fat Duck is part of a Grade II listed building, so I always knew there would come a time when it would need a little attention and the building itself would require a bit of modernisation – after all, it was built in 1640.”
The news comes just days after Rene Redzepi announced he would be relocating his Noma restaurant to Kyoto in Japan for two months in 2015.
